
Class. 
Book 



ROGER LUDLOW 



ROGER LUDLOW 

THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER 






JOHN M: TAYLOR 

" i 

AUTHOR OF " MAXIMILIAN AND CARLOTTA 



ife 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

XLbc •ftnicfcerbocfter press 

1900 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Declarations of the Forefathers ... 1-4 

CHAPTER I. 

Pilgrim and Puritan — Civil and Ecclesiastical Despotism — 
Puritanism, its Causes, its Opportunity — King and Com- 
monwealth — The Expatriation — Political and Commercial 
Factors — Historical Estimate — Retrospect . . . 5-14 

CHAPTER II. 

Early Settlements — The Plymouth Tragedy — Emigration of 
1630 — The Crisis — Church and State — Buckingham and 
Laud — Royal Charter — Pioneers and Leaders — Coming of 
Ludlow 15-23 

CHAPTER III. 

Ludlow's Ancestry and Family — Knights of the Shire — Sir 
Edmund — Sir Henry — Military and Parliamentary Services 
— Relationship by Marriage to Governor Endicott and 
Chief Justice Popham — Student at Oxford and in the Inner 
Temple — Entries of the Ludlow Family in the Inner 
Temple Records — Race of Lawyers — John White — The 
Dorchester Company — Governor and Company of Massa- 
chusetts Bay in New England — Ludlow an Assistant — 
Distinguished Associates — Arrival in May, 1630 . . 24-31 



vi CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER IV. 

PAGE 

Ludlow in Massachusetts — Leader in Public Affairs — Stock- 
holder — Landowner — Auditor of Governor Winthrop's Ac- 
counts — Superintendent of Fortifications — Military Com- 
missioner — Magistrate — Legislator — Deputy Governor — 
The Charter — Its Contravention — Assumption of Power 
— Ludlow's Protest — Magisterial Sentiment — Church Mem- 
bership Test — Popular Remonstrance — Choice of Deputies 
— Cotton's Postulate 32-44 

CHAPTER V. 

Ludlow's Attitude as an Assistant — Change of Views — His De- 
feat for the Governorship — Election of Haynes — Winthrop's 
Explanation — Ludlow's Objection — Overslaughed — Res- 
olutions to Remove to Connecticut — The Removal — Its 
Real Cause — Ludlow, Hooker, Cotton, Stone — Ministerial 
Interference — Magisterial Arrogance — Court and Com- 
mons 45-49 

CHAPTER VI. 

The Valley of the Long River — Knowledge of its Resources — 
Block — VVahginnacut — Oldham — The Leave to Remove — 
Cambridge — Watertown — Dorchester — Commission to Gov- 
ern the New Colony — Ludlow Made its Head — The Agree- 
ment — Its Text — Trumbull's Definition . . . 50-56 

CHAPTER VII. 

Ludlow's Initiative — Occupation — Conflicting Interests — In- 
dians — Dutch — Plymouth Men — Saltonstall's Company 
— Ludlow's Firmness and Diplomacy — " Ye Controversie " 
— Underbill's Notice — Brewster's Letter — Vane's Demand 
— First Comers — First Winter — Sufferings and Losses — 



CONTENTS. vii 

PAGE 

Spring of 1636 — Organization of Court — Laws and Ordi- 
nances — Important Measures — Administration of Justice 
— Ludlow de Facto Governor and Chief Justice — The 
Massachusetts " Agreement " Fulfilled . . . 57-65 



CHAPTER VIII. 

A Crisis — "The Pequoitt Potencie" — Indian Atrocities — 
Declaration of War — Civilization v. Barbarism — Mason's 
Expedition — The Fort Fight — Stone's Thanksgiving — 
Mason's Battle — Ludlow's Foresight — His Letter to 
Pynchon — The Swamp Fight Uncas and Miantonomo — 
Fair Unquowa — Ludlow's Services, 1635-1639 . . 66-72 

CHAPTER IX. 

The Fundamental Orders — No Record — None Desired — 
Opinions of Hoadley and Trumbull — At their Adoption 

— Leaders — New Chapter in History — Text of the Con- 
stitution — Law of the People — Views of Jurists and 
Historians — Bancroft — Palfrey — Fiske — Green — Tarbox 
— Bryce — Sanford —Trumbull — Robinson — Johnston — 
Hamersley — Bushnell — Day — Brinley . . . 73~86 

CHAPTER X. 

Who Inspired the Constitution — Hooker — The Sermon — Wol- 
cott's Notes — Trumbull's Interpretation — Doctrine — 
Reasons — Historical Estimates — Johnston — Fiske — Elliott 

— Twichell— Walker — Who Wrote the Constitution — 
Ludlow — His Qualifications — Opinions — Hollister — Tuttle 

— Stiles — Bancroft — Schenck — Trumbull — Walker — 
Elliott — Hawes — Robinson — Brinley — Beers — Waters 

— Hooker Visioned and Ludlow Wrote the Fundamental 
Orders 87-96 



viii CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XI. 

PAGE 

The Code of 1650 — Ludlow's " Body of Lawes" — Requested to 
Draft it by General Court — The Criminal Code — Massa- 
chusetts Body of Liberties — Differences — Code Four Years 
in Preparation — What it Was — Its Recognition in Legis- 
lation — Its Intrinsic Merits — Witnesses to its Authorship 
and Value — De Tocqueville — Trumbull — Day — Brinsley 
— Hamersley — Robinson — Schenck — Stiles . . 97-105 

CHAPTER XII. 

Kramer of the Constitution and the Code — Other Duties and 
Honors — Magistrate — Commissioner — Deputy Governor — 
At Windsor — Absence from Court — At Pequannocke — 
Purchase from the Indians — Fairfield — Reprimand — Plea 
of Justification — Court's Sanction — Advantage of the 
Purchase 106-113 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Dutch Claims in Connecticut — Confederation — Johnston's 
Opinion — Contention 1635-1664 — Indian Allies — Diplo- 
macy — Commissioners' Charges — Stuyvesant's Denial — 
Refusal of Massachusetts — Nullification — Historical Inci- 
dents — Rhode Island — Underhill — Petition to Cromwell 
— Ships and Troops — Peace Declaration . . . 114-121 

CHAPTER XIV. 

Virginia Massacre — Delaware Colonists — Mohawks — French in 
Canada — Six Nations— French Embassy to New England 
— Treachery and Intrigue — Rivalry of Indian Sachems — 
Threats, Plots, and Murders — Apprehension in Border 
Towns — Alarm of the Colonists — War Preparations — 



CONTENTS. ix 

PAGS 

Rebellion at Stamford — Connecticut and New Haven Re- 
fuse Assistance — Fairfield Raises Troops — Ludlow Chosen 
Commander — Reasons for his Action — Notice to Authorities 
— Their Disapproval 122-133 

CHAPTER XV. 

Witchcraft— Ancestors' Convictions —English Law— Persecu- 
tion— King James — More — Fuller — Granvil — Massachu- 
setts—Mather—Witchcraft Laws— Capital Crime— Good- 
man — Knapp — Bassett — Accusation of Ludlow — Staples v. 
Ludlow — The Charges — The Defence— Fines — Subse- 
quent Indictment of Plaintiff's Wife for Familiarity with 
Satan i34-*40 

CHAPTER XVI. 

Ludlow's Departure from Connecticut — Its Causes — Day's 
Statement — Arrival in England — Return to Ireland— Set- 
tlement at Dublin— Services There— Cromwell's Preference 
— Magistrate — Commissioner of Forfeited Estates — 
Master in Chancery— His Associates — Pepys— Corbett — 
Cooke — Reading — Allen — Carteret — Order of Lord 
Deputy and Council — Master in Chancery — Last Record 
of Service, December 16, 1659 — Death of his Wife — Resi- 
dent of St. Michan's Parish in 1664, at Age of 74— Esti- 
mate of his Qualities and Achievements — Brinley's In- 
cription — The State Capitol — Its Honor to Hooker, 
Davenport, Trumbull, Sherman — Its Duty to Ludlow — 
Its Opportunity 141-162 

Bibliographical Notes 163-166 



DECLARATIONS OF THE FOREFATHERS 



DEC LARA TIONS. 

Now next after this heavenly peace with God and 
our consciences, we are carefully to provide for peace 
with all men, what in us lieth, especially with our asso- 
ciates, and for that watchfulness which must be had 
that we neither at all in ourselves do give, no, nor easily 
take offence being given by others. — From Robinson's 
Letter to the Pilgrims. 

Fifthly and lastly, and which was not the least, a 
great hope and inward zeal they had of laying some good 
foundation, or at least to make some way thereunto for 
the propagating and advancement of the Gospel of the 
Kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world ; 
yea, although they should be but as stepping-stones unto 
others for the performance of so great a work. — From 
New England' s Memorial. 

The desire of carrying the Gospel of Christ unto 
those foreign parts, amongst those people that as yet 
have had no knowledge nor taste of God, as also to pro- 
cure unto themselves and others a quiet and comfortable 
habitation, were, among other things, the inducements 
unto those undertakers of the then hopeful and now ex- 
perimentally known good enterprise for plantations in 
New England, to set afoot and prosecute the same. — 
From Mourt's Relation. 

A removal from a place where the ministers of God 
are unjustly inhibited from the execution of their func- 
tions, to a place where they more freely execute the 

3 



4 ROGER LUDLOW 

same. — From Richard Mather's Six Reasons for Re- 
moval. 

In the name of God : Amen. We whose names are 
underwritten . . . having undertaken, for the glory 
of God and the advancement of the Christian faith, and 
the honour of our king and country, a voyage to plant 
the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by 
these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of 
God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves 
together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering 
and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid ; 
and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such 
just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and 
offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet 
and convenient for the general good of the colony, unto 
which we promise all due submission and obedience. — 
From The " AT ay flower " Compact. 

Whereas, we all came into these parts of America with 
one and the same ayme, namely, to advance the King- 
dom of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to enjoy the Gospel 
in purity and peace. — From Articles of Confederation 
(1643). 



ROGER LUDLOW 

THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 



CHAPTER I. 

Pilgrim and Puritan — Civil and Ecclesiastical Despotism — Puritan- 
ism, its Causes, its Opportunity — King and Commonwealth — 
The Expatriation — Political and Commercial Factors — Histori- 
cal Estimate — Retrospect. 

Pilgrim and Puritan speak, in these solemn 
declarations, of the forefathers. They are 
weighted with their convictions and purposes 
in their conscientious revolt against the abuse 
of human authority in religion, and of royal 
prerogative in the state. They mark the chief 
events in the historic exodus, from the farewell 
at Delft Haven to the birth of the colonial 
league. They ring the challenge of the man- 
at-arms, and breathe the prayer of the man of 
God. 



6 ROGER LUDLOW 

" Once more to us a voice is sent, 
Crying from out the wild, ' Repent ! 
Repent ! and evermore repent ! ' " 

They tell of the faith of Robinson and Hooker, 
the piety of Brewster, the diplomacy of Wins- 
low and Winthrop, the valor of Standish and 
Mason ; they define the cardinal motives of 
the strong and masterful men among the 
twenty-six thousand people who came over 
from Old England to New England from 1620 
to 1640. 

And these motives had their origin in the 
ecclesiastical and civil despotism of the Eng- 
lish Church and Throne, with its rancorous 
doctrinal hatreds, which found chief expression 
in the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, 
and its enforcement in the Courts of High 
Commission and Star Chamber. 

Nonconformist, Independent, Separatist, 
but witness the evolution of the once loyal 
churchman into the recusant who knew no 
compromise and halted at no hardships. " Do 
I mak the bishops? Do I mak the judges? 
Then God wauns, I mak what likes me, law 
and Gospel," said King James. And it was 
this law and this gospel, construed and ex- 
pounded by the royal will and pleasure, and 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 7 

offering alike to priest and layman the bitter 
chalice of obedience, that in part invited, and 
at last compelled, the sacrifices of the expa- 
triation. 

To intolerance and persecution in matters of 
belief and worship were added the hateful en- 
croachments upon the civil and political rights 
of the people exemplified in the royal conceit 
" that it is presumption and high contempt in 
a subject, to dispute what a king can do." 
Proroguing Parliaments without reason, reign- 
ing without them, levying duties against re- 
monstrance, raising revenue by forced loans 
and benevolences, denying the redress of 
grievances and the right to discuss state ques- 
tions, were the answers of kingship to the 
popular declarations that parliamentary privi- 
leges were the birthright of the people ; that 
lawmaking and usurpations of authority were 
proper questions of debate ; and that mem- 
bers of Parliament of right should have free- 
dom of speech : kingly pride and domination 
against the patriotism of Hampden, Pym, 
Ludlow, Eliot, Coke, and Selden ; the bigotry 
and arrogance of the Stuarts against the resist- 
less uplifting of the English people to a higher 
moral and intellectual freedom. 



8 ROGER LUDLOW 

" Two doctrines in religion arrayed themselves each 
against the other. Two parties in the State entered 
upon a great contention. Two theories of life and con- 
duct stood opposed. All things tended toward a vast 
disruption ; and in the strife of King and Common- 
wealth, of Puritan and Anglican, that disruption was 
accomplished." 

Puritanism found its opportunity and service 
in this great conflict ; and at last, from a ma- 
jority content with a victory over kingcraft 
secured by law, there came a resolute minority 
to write a new chapter in the world's history, 
and armed with the qualities which in all times 
have marked the pioneers in adventure, dis- 
covery, and civilization. It is the typical man 
of this minority who in Parliament and con- 
venticle, in camp and field, in council-chamber 
and meeting-house, gave character, inspiration, 
perpetuity, to the historic movement which has 
been called the last of our great Heroisms. 
Curtis thus describes him : " The Puritan was 
hard, severe, sour, sober, and bigoted ; but 
God sifted three kingdoms to find him where- 
with to plant a free republic." 

" God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for 
His planting, 
Then had sifted the wheat, as the living seed of a 
nation." — Courtship of Miles Standish. 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 9 

Artist, poet, historian, and philosopher have 
pictured him in diverse colors and attitudes, — 
malcontent, fanatic, hero, martyr ; but no one 
in all history has questioned his sincerity or 
courage. He was a radical from his environ- 
ment, from intensity of will and performance, 
and by sure degrees became a leader in the 
revolution which both in its vigor and its de- 
cadence gave to the world those men and 
women of heroic mould, ordained an aristoc- 
racy, not by decree of kings, but by virtue of 
their own moral strength. And having kept 
the faith through years of bitterness and sacri- 
fice, they looked for the final salvation of their 
cause only in a new order of things overseas. 

The beginnings of this great task fell to a 
few winnowed from the Puritan ranks by dif- 
ferences of doctrine, of politics, and modes of 
worship, and given their unique place in his- 
tory as Separatists. They believed not in the 
reformation of errors and abuses in the Church 
from within, nor in civil and religious freedom 
under the laws of England as then admin- 
istered ; and they finally sought their reme- 
dies in remonstrance, in endurance, in exile, 
" that especially the seed of Abraham his ser- 
vant, and the children of Jacob his chosen, 



io ROGER LUDLOW 

might remember his marvellous works in the 
beginning and progress of the planting of New- 
England, his wonders, and the judgments of 
his mouth." 

Their independence of creed and polity, 
involving loss of property, social ostracism, 
and imprisonment, vitalized by the teaching 
and example of Robinson, Bradford, Brew- 
ster, and others, led to the removal and stay 
at Amsterdam and Leyden ; and from these 
colonists came the fathers of the republic, the 
Pilgrims, the settlers at Plymouth in 1620. Is 
it not well certified in prayer and hymn and 
league and solemn covenant, that they came 
hither " to advance the Kingdom of Christ, 
and propagate and enjoy the gospel in purity 
and peace " ? 

But other motives than religious ones were 
deeply rooted in the composite character of 
the colonist. Civil freedom was as dear to 
him as his religious freedom ; in fact, it was an 
integral part of it. Constitutions, codes, bodies 
of liberties, all witness his aggressive demand 
for recognition. 

" It is no matter what was his political creed, or his re- 
ligious creed, whether cavalier or roundhead, puritan or 
churchman, the emigrant was an Englishman ; and every 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 



ii 



Englishman then and since held the faith that liberty 
was his of right, and when liberty is put on the ground of 
right it implies the assertion that government must be 
founded on right, and that liberty belongs to other men 
also ; and that implies government by law. ^OUcmjus 
sine officio, nullum officium sine jure. -Hoar : The Law- 
yer a?id the State. 

Any analysis of the causes of the emigration 
must also take account of another factor coup- 
led with the religious and political ones, — the 
adventures for profit embodied in the trading 
charters, exploited by the man of commercial 
instinct and enterprise, who wrote his name in 
compact and article with the minister and the 
captain, and whose history was not spread on 
the record of court or church. The Pilgrim 
with his conscience and creed, and the Puritan 
with his Bible and blunderbuss, are but foremost 
fio-ures in the ranks of freemen hot-foot for 
their political rights, adventurers of the trading 
companies, soldiers of fortune, yeomen, all truly 
representative of the complex quality of the 
colonization. 

After the Pilgrims came thousands from the 
mother country, among them men of station 
and estate,-clergymen, soldiers, merchants, 
landowners, courtiers, students of the univer- 
sities and inns of court. Cotton and Hooker, 



12 ROGER LUDLOW 

Stone and Davenport, Endicott, Dudley, and 
Winthrop, Vane, Gardiner, and Underhill, 
Eaton, Haynes, and Goodyear, Wolcott and 
Wyllys, — were they not apostles of a catholic 
faith in government of the people, by the peo- 
ple, and of a new civilization, free from the 
domination of the English Church and State ? 
These men, — Pilgrim and Puritan, — their an- 
tecedents, and their historic mission, are thus 
estimated : 

" On December 21, 1620, the little band landed on a 
rock on the western side of the bay, held in the circling 
arm of Cape Cod, and called the place Plymouth. It 
was the founding of a nation on that bleak, wintry day ; 
and posterity has never failed thus far to recognize and 
commemorate it. They seem to have known it, too, 
those Pilgrims of Plymouth. They were very humble 
folk for the most part, poor and untitled, artisans, fisher- 
men, and farmers from the villages of East Anglia. . . . 
Bradford and his friends had ' empire in their brains,' 
even if they were not clearly conscious of it. . . . 
They did not come merely to make money or get a home 
in a new land. Even the high purpose of securing a 
place where they could worship God unharmed, and in 
their own fashion, was not their only object. They 
came to establish a state which should cover all these 
things, but which should also be a commonwealth where 
those who made it ruled it, and not kings or priests or 
nobles whom accident placed over them. . . . Eight 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 13 

years after the landing at Plymouth there came another 
immigration to New England. It was made up of men 
of the same race as those of Plymouth, and was started 
by a like impulse ; but there the resemblance ceased. 
They were not adventurers come to seek an Eldorado ; 
they did not come to trade, as the Dutch came to New 
York. They were not Separatists, but members of the 
Church of England who had sought to reform the abuses 
of that church, and, failing at home, crossed the sea to 
preserve what they believed to be the true faith. They 
were Puritans, men of the country party. Their leaders 
were of the class that produced Pym and Hampden and 
Cromwell. . . . Their clergy were of the estab- 
lished church, deprived members often, graduates of 
Oxford and Cambridge, scholars and preachers stern 
and strong. . . . The body of the immigrants were 
yeomen and farmers and workingmen, own brothers to 
those who filled the ranks of Cromwell's Ironsides and 
dashed to pieces the cavaliers of Rupert and the hardy 
Scotchmen of Leslie. ... It was a vigorous de- 
mocracy, and full of vitality." — Lodge: The Colonial 
Period. 

Amid the solemn cadences of the Recessional 
— that hymn of warning and prophecy — does 
not the attuned ear catch, across the centuries, 
the vaporings of kings, the challenges of the 
commoners, the clash of arms in the onsets at 
Worcester, Dunbar, Naseby, Edgehill, Mars- 
ton, and Newbury, whenever in men's minds 
ran the refrain, — 



14 ROGER LUDLOW 

" Then be stout of heart when the field is set 
And the smoke is hanging low, 
And the pike-heads shine along the line 
To meet the advancing foe " ; 

the anathemas of Laud ; the murderous judg- 
ments of Jeffries ; the regicides' decree ; the 
prayers of priests ; the cries of martyrs ; the 
echoes of the Puritan spirit which underlies 
the destiny of the English-speaking peoples, 
whether of kingdom, empire, or republic ? 

" God of our fathers, known of old, 
Lord of our far-flung battle-line, 
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold 

Dominion over palm and pine : 
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forget ! Lest we forget ! " 

Yea, of that Puritanism of which Carlyle, in 
The Hero a King, said : 

"It stood preaching in its bare pulpit with nothing 
but the Bible in its hand " ; and again : " It has got 
weapons and sinew, and it has firearms, war navies ; it 
has cunning in its fingers, strength in its right arm, it can 
steer ships, fell forests, remove mountains, it is one of 
the strongest things under this sun at present." 



CHAPTER II. 

Early Settlements — The Plymouth Tragedy — Emigration of 1630 — 
The Crisis— Church and State — Buckingham and Laud — Royal 
Charter — Pioneers and Leaders — Coming of Ludlow. 

In the bitterness and desolation of winter at 
Plymouth, in the face of sickness and pesti- 
lence and death, these " very humble folk," the 
little company from the Mayflower, set up the 
standard of the new "undertakings." What 
tragedy has been so simply told as in these 
lines from Bradford's journal ? 

" In two or three months' time half of this company- 
died, especially in January and February ; being the 
depth of winter, wanting houses and other comforts ; 
being infected with the scurvy and other diseases which 
this long voyage and their incommodate condition had 
brought upon them ; so as there died sometimes two, 
sometimes three, on a day, in the aforesaid time, that of 
one hundred and odd persons scarce fifty remained." 

On this spot, consecrated by the purest hero- 
ism, Carver and Bradford, Allerton, Winslow, 

15 



16 ROGER LUDLOW 

Standish, and their associates made religious 
and political covenants and contracts of trade, 
established laws and ordinances, and chose 
officers to execute them, imposed taxes, insti- 
tuted religious services, formed military com- 
panies, held the Indians at bay, neutralized 
conspiracies at home and abroad, banished 
malcontents and mischief - makers, allotted 
lands in severalty, and so in due time laid 
the foundations of a government rooted in 
the verities wherewithal men are made truly 
free and equal before the law. Meanwhile 
other colonists had made homes elsewhere. 
Fishermen from West England built their 
huts at Cape Ann ; planters settled at various 
places, notably Gray and Knight at Nan- 
tasket, Maverick at Noddle's Island, Jeffrey 
at Winnisimmett, Walford at Wishawum, and 
Blackstone at Shawmut. Lyford, the pious 
renegade, and Oldham, " a chief stickler in the 
faction among the particulars," who was later 
expelled from the colony, the authorities hav- 
ing "appointed a gard of musketeers wch he 
was to pass throu, and every one was ordered 
to give him a thump . . . with ye but 
end of his musket," also settled at Nantasket. 
Morton, "of Clifford's Inn Gent," author of 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. i 7 

the screed, The New English Canaan, with a 
band of roysterers, gathered at Wollaston ; 
and at their headquarters, called " Merry 
Mount," they started " a school of atheisme," 
set up a maypole, " and did quaff strong wa- 
ters, and act as if they had anew revived and 
celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddess 
Flora, or the beastly practices of ye madd 
Bachanalians." They sold rum and muskets 
to the Indians, in defiance of orders, until 
Standish with his escort laid his strong hand 
upon them and dispersed the gang of revellers, 
and sent Morton into England. 

In ten years from the landing of the Pil- 
grims, settlements had been made at Salem, 
Charlestown, Dorchester, Boston, Watertown, 
Mystic, and Lynn. John Endicott, destined 
to high honor in colonial annals, and his com- 
pany, with a grant from the Council for New 
England to John White, rector of Trinity 
Church, Dorchester, and his associates, of land 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific in length, anc i 
in width from the river Merrimac to the river 
Charles, made their homes at Salem in 1629; 
and these were the most notable of the 
" Newcomers " until the great emigration of 
1630. 



18 ROGER LUDLOW 

Many causes combined to invite and compel 
the Puritan emigration in this year. The crisis 
had come ; choice must be made between abso- 
lute monarchy at home and liberty abroad. 
Certain historical facts bring into clear light 
the exact situation of affairs. The Pilgrim 
colonization had been watched with intense 
interest by the Puritans. Governor Bradford 
had wisely said : " The light here kindled hath 
shone to many, in some sort to our whole 
nation." When King Charles came to the 
throne, he was deemed a sound Protestant, 
wise enough to avoid his father's mistakes and 
respect the popular will. But Buckingham 
was his closest friend, and Laud his religious 
counsellor. In the face of warning and re- 
monstrance, and despite the opposition of 
Parliament, these were some of the royal per- 
formances : The King elevated to bishoprics 
Montague and Mainwaring, whom Parliament 
had sent to prison for seditious utterances ; 
Eliot and Hampden were imprisoned for their 
defence of the rights of the people ; within 
four years he dissolved three Parliaments for 
refusal to yield to his unlawful demands ; after 
giving a hypocritical assent to the historic 
Petition of Right, he deliberately violated 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 19 

every promise ; arbitrary penalties were im- 
posed ; monopolies were sold ; customs duties 
were collected without authority of law ; pro- 
tests were met by fines, and loans demanded 
from the freeholders in every shire. 

Laud supplemented the King's actions, in 
the madness of ecclesiastical zeal. He sev- 
ered the relations between the continental re- 
formed churches and the Church of England ; 
he withdrew freedom of worship from the 
Protestant refugees, and banished those who 
would not conform to the ritual ; lectureships 
were suppressed ; the right to appoint their 
own ministers in Puritan parishes was de- 
nied ; the importation of Genevan Bibles was 
prohibited ; and ministers were deprived of 
their livings for refusing to read a declaration 
in favor of Sunday sports. Thus State and 
Church were at one in the tyranny which at 
last ripened into the Great Rebellion. 

In the height of this contest the chief emigra- 
tion to New England began. At Cambridge, in 
1629, Winthrop, Saltonstall, Pynchon, Dudley, 
and others obtained the Royal Charter to 
"The Government and Company of Massa- 
chusetts Bay in New England." And — under 
the mighty impulse of the actual transfer of 



20 ROGER LUDLOW 

the charter to the new country by the royal 
consent — in four years thereafter, four thou- 
sand Englishmen had come over under this 
company's auspices ; and around the shores 
of the bay many permanent settlements had 
been made. 

Strong characters were these among the 
early colonists, — Carver, Brewster, Bradford, 
Prince, and Standish ; Winthrop, " patient in 
toil, serene amidst alarms " ; Dudley, honest, 
" of approved wisdom and godliness," but ar- 
rogant and intolerant in counsel and debate, of 
whom his latest eulogist says, in the words of 
Tacitus respecting Agricola : " Scorning to 
disguise his sentiments, he acted always with 
a generous warmth at the hazard of making 
enemies " ; Cotton, the silenced rector of St. 
Botolph's, who, as he said, loved to sweeten 
his mouth with a piece of Calvin before going 
to sleep, who would make the magisterial rule 
exclusive and perpetual, whose crucial test of 
citizenship was church-membership, and yet, to 
his admirers, " Than him in flesh scarce dwelt 
a better one " ; Eliot, the enthusiast and 
scholar, "whose abilities and acceptations in 
the ministry did excel," with his message of 
peace to the Indians ; Mason, Gardiner, Un- 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 21 

derhill, and Stoughton, soldiers of distinction ; 
Hooker, Cotton's friend, the clerical states- 
man, — 

" Deep was his knowledge, judgment was acute, 
His doctrines solid which none could dispute. 

" Sweet peace he gave to such as were contrite ; 
Their darkness sad he turned to joyous light. 

" Each ear that heard him said, He spake to me, 
So piercing was his holy ministry " ; 

Bellingham, the stern moralist from his own 
point of view — "The Quaker at his thunder 
fled " ; Vane, the colonial champion at home 
and abroad ; Roger Williams, who, with all his 
heresies, almost alone among the men of his 
day conceived the present idea of the State as 
limited in its powers, and saw no divine right 
in the civil authority to crush so-called reli- 
gious errors; Haynes, "of large estate and 
larger affections," whom Massachusetts and 
Connecticut crowned with highest honors ; 
Winthrop, Jr., scholar and Puritan patriot; 
Eaton, the man of affairs and diplomat, colo- 
nial Governor at New Haven ; Davenport, the 
saintly theocrat ; Stone, Hooker's successor as 
teacher of the church at Hartford : 



22 ROGER LUDLOW 

" A stone for kingly David's use so fit, 
As would not fail Goliah's front to hit " ; 

Norton, Cotton's successor at Boston, com- 
panion of Bradstreet in his mission to England : 

" Of a more heavenly strain his notions were, 
More pure, sublime, scholastical and clear ; 
More like the Apostles Paul and John, I wist, 
Was this our orthodox evangelist " ; 

and Wyllys, Hopkins, Steele, Wolcott, and 
others, ministers, magistrates, legislators, sol- 
diers, to whom their countrymen entrusted the 
vital questions of Church and State in the 
colonial days. 

Into this company of masterful men, to deal 
with the greatest and gravest principles of 
government, and at some time to measure his 
own qualities and opinions with theirs in the 
fierce light of intense theological and political 
controversies, to battle for the recognition of 
great constitutional principles, to embody them 
by precedent, statute, and ordinance in the 
jurisprudence of a new civilization in his twen- 
ty-four years of service to Massachusetts and 
Connecticut, came, with a notable company 
in the ship Mary and John (" Mr. Ludlowe's 
vessel"), in May, 1630, 

ROGER LUDLOW. 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 23 

So much of retrospect, of historical truth, 
and of sentiment, which is the crystallization 
of history, of the judgment of men and their 
achievements by their contemporaries, seems 
germane to the study of a character in itself 
typical of the Puritan movement and its mo- 
tives, both religious and political. 



CHAPTER III. 

Ludlow's Ancestry and Family — Knights of the Shire — Sir Edmund — 
Sir Henry — Military and Parliamentary Services — Relationship 
by Marriage to Governor Endicott and Chief Justice Popham — 
Student at Oxford and in the Inner Temple — Entries of the 
Ludlow Family in the Inner Temple Records — Race of Lawyers 
— John White — The Dorchester Company — Governor and Com- 
pany of Massachusetts Bay in New England — Ludlow an Assist- 
ant — Distinguished Associates — Arrival in May, 1630. 

Ludlow came of an ancient English family, 
very simply described by its illustrious son, 
Sir Edmund Ludlow, in speaking of it as 

" originally known in Shropshire, and from thence trans- 
planted into the county of Wilts, where his ancestors 
possessed such an estate as placed them in the first rank 
of gentlemen, and gave them just pretences to stand 
candidates to represent the county in Parliament as 
Knights of the Shire, which honor they seldom failed to 
attain." 

All these forebears and kinsmen were " those 
whom their race and bloud, or at least their ver- 
tues, do make noble and knowne." Roger Lud- 
low was the second son of Thomas Ludlow, 

24 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 25 

of Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire, Knight, and 
Jane Pyle, sister of Sir Gabriel Pyle, Knight, 
and was born in March, 1590. His father 
was uncle of Sir Henry Ludlow, who sat 
in the Long Parliament in 1640, a brilliant 
advocate of the liberties of the people, and 
taking rank in his service with the great lead- 
ers of the Puritan party ; and great-uncle of 
Sir Edmund Ludlow, a graduate of Oxford, a 
volunteer with the troop of horse from the 
students of the Inns of Court in the life-guard 
of the Earl of Essex at the battle of Edgehill, 
who won the highest military rank as Lieuten- 
ant-General, served with great distinction in 
Parliament, was a member of the court at the 
trial of King Charles, refused all inducements 
from Cromwell to serve his imperial ambition, 
and who, after the Restoration, was outlawed, 
shorn of his titles and estates, and died in ex- 
ile in Switzerland, leaving in his memoirs one 
of the most valuable of all accounts of that 
notable period in English history, and whom 
Macaulay calls " the most illustrious survivor 
of a mighty race of men, the judges of a king, 
the founders of a republic." 

Ludlow's eldest brother, Gabriel, was ad- 
mitted as a student to the Inner Temple in 



26 ROGER LUDLOW 

1610, became a Barrister in 1620, and won the 
honor of a Bencher in 1637. His youngest 
brother, George, emigrated to New England, 
and thence to Virginia, where he acquired a 
large estate, became prominent in colonial af- 
fairs, and a member of the Parliamentary 
Council. 

Gabriel Ludlow, cousin to Roger, distin- 
guished for his bravery in the defence of Wer- 
der Castle, fell at the battle of Newbury ; and 
another cousin, Robert, an officer of the Par- 
liamentary army, died of cruel treatment while 
a prisoner in the hands of the Royalists, after 
the siege of York. 

Roger Ludlow married Mary Endicott, a 
sister of Governor John Endicott of Massachu- 
setts, and was related on the mother's side to 
the family of Chief Justice Popham, long noted 
as the founder of the first colonies in Maine. 
In camp and Parliament, at home and abroad, 
soldiers, lawyers, scholars, statesmen from the 
Ludlow families were standard-bearers for the 
Puritans in their long contest with kings and 
Lord Protector, and often to the sacrifice of 
life and fortune ; and that they were wedded 
to the profession of the law is clearly shown in 
the following entries from the records of the 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 27 

Inner Temple, including the manuscript note 
of Roger Ludlow's own admission there : 



MEMBERS ADMITTED TO THE INNER TEMPLE 
I 547-1 660. 

1609 Nov. 

Henry Ludlow (Sir), Maiden Bradley, Wilts Sheriff of 
Wilts 1633. 
M.P. 1640. Died 1643. 

1609 Nov. 

Edmund Ludlowe, Hill Deverell, Wilts 
Second son of Henry Ludlow. 
Seated at Tadley, Hants. Died 1644. 

1610 Nov. 

Gabriel Ludlow, Butleigh, Somersetshire. B. 1620. 
Called to the Bench, 1637. 

Edmund Ludlow, Maiden Bradley, Wilts. Son & heir 
of Sir Henry Ludlow, Kt. Born 1620. M.P. for 
Hindon. One of the King's Judges. Died 1693 
at Vevay. 

1637 Nov. 

Gabriel Ludlow, Son & heir of Gabriel Ludlowe, a 
Bencher. 



28 ROGER LUDLOW 

Admissions 1571-1640. 

Ludlow Rogerus. 

Rogerus Ludlowe de Warmynstere in Comitatu Wiltes, 
Generosus, admissus est in Societatem ipsius Com- 
itivse in consideratione trium librarum, sex sol- 

l s d 

idorum et octo denariorum, (llj vi viii) prse- 
manibus solutorum xxviij die Januarii Anno xp. 
supradicto (1612). 



. .. j Thomas Ludlowe ) 

° ( Edmond Ludlowe, ) 



Of such lineage and kinship, and living in a 
time when great deeds were done, Ludlow 
found his fitting place with the Puritans, who 
were called by both duty and choice to the 
field of adventure and preferment in New 
England. To this service he crave his for- 
tune ; and he brought to it a thorough educa- 
tional equipment and discipline, as he was 
matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, in 
1 6 10, and became a student in the Inner 
Temple in 16 12. All his years, from collegi- 
ate days to his departure for New England at 
the age of forty, were devoted to academic 
and legal training, research, and experience ; 
so attaining the mastery of principles, prece- 
dents, and forms, and that knowledge of legal 
procedure which marked him, to his jealous 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 29 

and critical associates, as the man among them 
all to adapt, originate, and frame the funda- 
mental colonial laws, constitutional, statutory, 
political, civil, and criminal, in exact, compre- 
hensive, and finished legal phraseology. To 
do all this, and serve as magistrate, commis- 
sioner, legislator, jurist, became his ultimate 
task, his supreme honor, in the land of his 
adoption. 

Of the English clergy who were foremost 
in the Puritan emigration, none was more 
zealous than the Rev. John White, for forty 
years rector of Holy Trinity Church, Dor- 
chester. It was he who first organized the 
association known as the Dorchester Adven- 
turers, which made a sorry failure of the 
settlement at Cape Ann, " as the colonists 
were ill chosen, and fell into many disorders." 
When the design was abandoned, White per- 
suaded Conant, Woodbury, Balch, Palfrey, 
and others, who had removed to Salem, not to 
desert the enterprise ; and he undertook to 
send them men and supplies, and to obtain a 
patent. In March, 1628, he obtained a grant 
to John Endicott and others, known as the 
Dorchester Company, from Devon, Dorset, 
and Somerset, — "a godly and religious people, 



30 ROGER LUDLOW 

many of them persons of note and figure, 
being dignified with ye title of master, which 
but few in those days were." 

Great care was taken that this company 
should constitute a well-ordered settlement, 
with all the elements of an independent com- 
munity. Endicott made haste, and settled at 
Salem with his company in September, 1629. 
Six months later the six original patentees, 
with twenty- new associates, procured from 
Kinor Charles the famous charter of " The 
Governor and Company of Massachusetts 
Bay in New England." In this company 
Ludlow was chosen an assistant by the 
stockholders in London, "that his counsel 
and judgment might aid in preserving order, 
and founding the social structure upon the 
surest basis." 

Ludlow's associates and friends in the Dor- 
chester and Bay companies were men of 
achievement and renown, makers of the Eng- 
lish as well as the Xew England common- 
wealth, members of Parliament, some of them, 
and judges in the courts ; the Earl of War- 
wick, Lord Say and Sele, YVinthrop and 
Humphrey, Vane, Venn, Owen, Andrews, 
and Young among the number. The choice 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER 31 

of Ludlow as an assistant by such men marks 
his ability, his political, professional, and so- 
cial rank, and the qualities of leadership in 
the weighty problems that confronted the 
emigrants in the new world. 

In the first ship of the fleet, in the spring of 
1630, Ludlow set sail from Plymouth with 
Mason, trained under Fairfax in the Lowlands, 
the destroyer of the Pequots, and comrade 
in arms of Miles Standish ; Underhill, friend 
of Count Nassau ; Patrick, of the Prince of 
Orange Guard ; Southcote and Smith ; the 
minister Maverick and his colleague. Ware- 
ham ; with a goodly company, landing at Nan- 
tasket in May. 1650, and. after some mishaps, 
settling at Dorchester, so giving point to the 
ecstatic sentiment of Blake in his Annals : 

" The Lord Jesus Christ was so plainly held out in ye 
Preaching of ye Gospel to poor lost sinners, and ye ab- 
solute necessity of ye New Birth, and God's spirit in 
those days was pleased to accompany ye Word with 
such efficacy upon ye hearts of many, that our Hearts 
were quite taken off from Old England, and set upon 
Heaven." 



CHAPTER IV. 

Ludlow in Massachusetts — Leader in Public Affairs — Stockholder 
— Landowner — Auditor of Governor Winthrop's Accounts — 
Superintendent of Fortifications — Military Commissioner — 
Magistrate — Legislator — Deputy Governor — The Charter — Its 
Contravention — Assumption of Power — Ludlow's Protest — 
Magisterial Sentiment — Church-Membership Test — Popular 
Remonstrance — Choice of Deputies — Cotton's Postulate. 

Ludlow's service to Massachusetts covered 
a period of about five years, from the duties 
of a magistrate in the Court of Assistants, — the 
highest judicial tribunal of the colonial period 
to 1692, sometimes called the Great Charter 
Court, — to those of the Deputy Governor- 
ship. Then, as now, men were judged and 
their reputation was established by their con- 
duct of common affairs, the performance of 
religious, civil, social, and political duties in 
every-day life. 

Tried by this test, even the brief notices of 
Ludlow in the current records of the time 
are conclusive evidence of his command of the 
confidence and esteem of his fellow men. 

32 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 33 

A bare enumeration of the responsibilities 
entrusted to him demonstrates the high quality 
of his labors, in both personal and official 
station. He was one of Dorchester's three 
stockholders in the Bay Company ; he selected 
the site for the Dorchester plantation, was a 
landowner there under a grant from the Gen- 
eral Court, and was also land commissioner, 
land viewer, and surveyor ; he was appointed a 
justice of the peace, with Winthrop and Sal- 
tonstall, at the first session of the General 
Court in 1630; conducted the negotiations for 
the first treaty with the Pequots ; served as 
administrator of estates ; drafted orders and 
laws to meet emergencies, and held the rank 
of colonel ex officio. He was charged with the 
delicate task of auditing the account of Gov- 
ernor Winthrop's receipts and disbursements, 
and made a report to the satisfaction of the 
critical General Court. When the King- ere- 
ated the Court of Commissioners with plenary 
powers, in 1634, with Laud at the head of it, 
to take charge of the colonies and cancel all 
letters patent if found expedient, and Massa- 
chusetts was ordered to lay its charter before 
the Privy Council, so threatening the subver- 
sion of the colonial government and the 



34 ROGER LUDLOW 

overthrow of all that had been accomplished 
for human liberty, and the colonists resolved 
to defend themselves by force as well as by 
diplomacy, Ludlow was made superintendent 
of the fortifications at Castle Island, one of 
the most important points of resistance to the 
sea approach of an enemy ; and even when 
political sentiment toward him, in his last pub- 
lic service in Massachusetts, had somewhat 
changed, he was chosen a member of a mili- 
tary commission of most extraordinary author- 
ity, with his compeers, Winthrop, Dudley, 
Haynes, Endicott, Bellingham, Pynchon, and 
Bradstreet ; thus, by his pre-eminence in these 
varied relations, giving a new significance to 
Palfrey's stinted compliment that he was " the 
principal lay citizen of Dorchester." 

With such a record in private and public 
affairs of the lesser sort, of which little account 
has been taken by the earlier writers, and 
which would of themselves have entitled Lud- 
low to distinction, there remains for recog- 
nition his share as a jurist and legislator in 
the formative period of colonial history in 
Massachusetts. 

The nominal authority, executive, judicial, 
and legislative, rested in the royal charter ; 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 35 

but the real power, the right to govern, to 
conquer, to endure, to create a commonwealth 
all their own, lived only in the colonists them- 
selves. The letter was written in the English 
law ; but the spirit, the interpretation, was 
made in hymn and prayer and sermon, and in 
the grave debates of court and council. An 
assistant in the chartered Company at home, 
whose legitimate functions were those of a 
director in the usual affairs of a corporation, 
was, much to his liking, transformed in the 
colony to an executive, legislative, and judicial 
councillor, in both Church and State. 

The royal charter to the Governor and 
Company of Massachusetts Bay simply au- 
thorized the patentees to make laws and or- 
dinances not repugnant to English law, to 
choose officers, to administer oaths of su- 
premacy and allegiance to the freemen, to 
admit new associates, to transport malcon- 
tents, to resist invasion and intrusion by force 
of arms. Nothing was said of religious lib- 
erty ; and no condition of citizenship was pre- 
scribed, save the will and vote of those already 
freemen. From these narrow powers, the 
Governor, Deputy Governor, and assistants, 
with some notable exceptions, — undoubtedly 



36 ROGER LUDLOW 

pursuant to the original design, when the 
royal assent to the transfer of the charter to 
New England was secured, — undertook in 
their own way to build a state with a church 
covenant as an integral principle, a common- 
wealth on an ecclesiastical foundation, with 
church-membership the test of citizenship, and 
the tenure of the magisterial office made ex- 
clusive and perpetual. 

During Ludlow's terms of office in the Gen- 
eral Court as Assistant and Deputy Governor, 
in his regular attendance at the sessions, ques- 
tions of gravest concern were determined in 
which he bore a notable part. 

These, among others, were the weighty mat- 
ters to which the men of the Bay Colony de- 
voted themselves in the crucial years from 
1630 to 1635 : to allot lands and provide 
homes for settlers, to locate town sites, to 
build fortifications, to regulate prices of labor 
and materials, to create and maintain military 
forces, to appoint civil and military officers, to 
change the system of official elections, to grant 
licenses, to build roads and maintain ferries, 
to set up church-membership as the test of 
citizenship ; to organize churches " according 
to the Rule of the Gospel," not of the Anglican 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 37 

Church, notwithstanding the fraternal fare- 
well letter of Winthrop, Dudley, and others, 
" To the rest of their Brethren in and of the 
Church of England," and their prayers for the 
aid and grace of " our dear mother" ; to hold 
fast to the charter and their rights under it as 
they interpreted them, despite the imperative 
order to send it over to England and lay it before 
the Privy Council ; above all, to create in fact 
and in law the Puritan theocracy, not in the 
sense that political authority and power should 
be exercised by the ministers alone, since they 
were often rebuked for overstepping the lines 
of their calling in political matters, but that 
theocracy, no less potent in its practical appli- 
cation in the consciences of both priests and 
laymen, which the General Court undertook 
to define in a statute affirming- its faith in the 
Bible and prescribing a penalty for denial of 
its genuineness and authority. 

With the performance of his full duty in all 
these varied questions, public and private, in 
this great school of education, experience, and 
discipline, and especially in the vital matter of 
the return of the patent to England, wherein 
he was a zealous advocate of the waiting policy, 
expressed in Winthrop's record " to avoid and 



3 8 ROGER LUDLOW 

protract," and all in such wise as to win from 
his zealous and ambitious associates the high 
honor of Deputy Governor in 1634, — when 
Dudley was chosen Governor, and Winthrop 
took Ludlow's place as an Assistant, — it was 
at one point in his career in Massachusetts 
that Ludlow came into the strong light of 
criticism, and made a declaration which has 
colored his whole history, and which has been 
exploited to his discredit and disparagement, 
without recognition of his radical change of 
views as to the rights of the citizen, — as 
exemplified in his later service. 

Winthrop, in his journal, tells the story very 
simply, but the situation was dramatic, the con- 
troversies bitter. Dudley had broken out in a 
storm of accusations against the government, 
and in a fit of bitterness and anger had resigned 
from the magistracy, and was under discipline 
for his act. Other momentous questions in- 
vited radical differences of opinion ; and finally, 
at the session of the General Court in May, 
1632, the Governor said 

"that he had heard that the people intended, at the next 
general court, to desire that the assistants might be chosen 
anew every year, and that the governor might be chosen 
by the whole court, and not by the assistants only." 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER 39 

" Upon this Mr. Ludlow grew into a passion, and said 
that then we should have no government, but there 
would be an interim wherein every man might do what 
he pleased." " This was answered and cleared in the 
judgment of the rest of the assistants ; but he continued 
stiff in his opinion, and protested he would then return 
back into England." 

This incident has been exaggerated by some 
partisan writers to demonstrate that Ludlow 
was impetuous, irascible, of aristocratic tenden- 
cies, and wanting in the grace and dignity of 
high station when his personal ambition and 
interests came into conflict with popular de- 
mands or the performance of his official duty. 
Grant this, and yet he was only one of a goodly 
company at that time who believed, — relig- 
iously believed, — with Cotton, that " never did 
God ordain democracy for the government of 
the church or people," — a political tenet which 
made Massachusetts first an oligarchy, and 
then an aristocracy to the days of the revolu- 
tion, and which, in its hateful enforcement 
against the consciences of men, made demo- 
crats of Ludlow, Hooker, Haynes, and others, 
who left her jurisdiction because of its intoler- 
ance, and set up the standard of pure democ- 
racy in the valley of the Connecticut. 

A clearer light falls on this episode in 



40 ROGER LUDLOW 

Ludlow's career when it is recalled in brief what 
the Governor and Company of Massachusetts 
Bay undertook to do in the early years of the 
"sojourn" under the royal charter, and de- 
spite it, especially in the most vital matter of 
all, the elective franchise, — the right and 
power of men to govern themselves. It has 
been noted that Cradock, White, Saltonstall, 
and others secured from King Charles in 1629, 
the transfer of the patent and government to the 
freemen who should become inhabitants of the 
colony ; and the Company, in General Court 
at Cambridge, voted that the charter should 
be transferred and the powers under it exer- 
cised in New England. Winthrop and his 
Company, and the immigrants of 1630, came 
over under this corporate assurance and guar- 
antee. They were to become the interpreters 
of their own charter rights and privileges. 
They made haste with their work. 

At the first General Court, in October, 1630, 
one hundred and eighteen persons gave notice 
of their wish to take the oath and become 
members of the corporation. Such election 
would make a corporate majority of resident 
colonists. The men chosen to office in Eng- 
land took alarm at this issue, questioning the 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 41 

power and purpose of voters in the majority 
untrained in self-government and the exigen- 
cies of practical politics. But behind any 
public concern stood the fear of loss of office, 
with its dignity and honor, on the part of the 
magistrates themselves. 

Forthwith a meeting of the Company was 
held, and a rule was adopted which delegated 
to the Assistants alone the choice of Governor 
and Deputy Governor, and from their own 
number, in lieu of such election by the whole 
body of members (voters) ; and it also trans- 
ferred to the same officers the power of mak- 
ing laws, and of choosing officials to execute 
them ; thus leaving to the freemen only a 
voice in the yearly election of the Assistants 
themselves ; and in this way these men, to 
make permanent their tenure of office and 
maintain their magisterial control, defied the 
unwritten law of public opinion, that resistless 
force which bides its time and moulds all hu- 
man destiny, even under its most recent poli- 
tical definition. In the few months which 
intervened between this action and the session 
of the first General Court, the attempt of the 
magistrates to limit the method of election 
aroused bitter opposition in the minds of some 



42 ROGER LUDLOW 

of the most influential voters. At the Court in 
May, 1 63 1, the one hundred and eighteen per- 
sons who had given notice were chosen mem- 
bers of the Company and took the freemen's 
oath. 

Immediately the freemen, among whom were 
some of the early planters, jealous of the con- 
centration of power in the magistrates, re- 
scinded the previous vote, and took again into 
their own hands the election of the Company 
officers ; and, to secure their right of repre- 
sentation, they also ordered the choice " of 
two of every plantation to confer with the 
court about raising a public stock," the initia- 
tive of the regular election of deputies, the 
second legislative house, with a voice in all 
public affairs, save that every freeman had his 
vote in the election of officers. 

And again, these men, who had expatriated 
themselves for the sake of civil and religious 
liberty, at that time wrote another page of his- 
tory without a parallel. They " ordered and 
agreed, that, for the time to come, no man 
should be admitted to the freedom of this 
body politic but such as were members of 
some of the churches within the limits of the 
same. " 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 43 

Thus was an aristocracy created, not of birth 
or culture, of wealth, achievement, or distinc- 
tion, but one of persons whose sole test of 
quality was church membership, — a religious 
commonwealth. On this definition of citizen- 
ship, came Cotton, preaching the crusade of 
ecclesiastical domination in both spiritual and 
temporal affairs, abetted by the intemperate 
advocacy of his doctrines by his brethren ; set- 
ting up a separate clerico-magisterial estate, 
defined in spirit and purpose in Cotton's pos- 
tulate : " A magistrate ou^ht not to be turned 
into the condition of a private man without 
just cause, and to be publicly convict, no more 
than the magistrates may not turn a private 
man out of his freedom without like public 
trial." 

Count all the causes that inspired the break- 
ing away from the Bay Colony, including the 
superficial ones set down in the public records, 
which ripened first into the removal to Con- 
necticut, and the most potent one centres in 
the intolerance, and arrogance and narrow- 
ness of the ministerial dignitaries, and the 
church-membership test of citizenship. Adams, 
in The Emancipation of MassacJmsetts, defines 
the precise situation : 



44 ROGER LUDLOW 

" Though communicants were not necessarily voters, 
no one could be a voter who was not a communicant : 
therefore the town meeting was nothing but the church 
meeting, possibly somewhat attenuated, and called by 
a different name. By this insidious statute the clergy 
seized the temporal power, which they held till the char- 
ter fell. The minister stood at the head of the congre- 
gation, and moulded it to suit his purposes and to do his 
will. Common men could not have kept this hold upon 
the inhabitants of New England ; but the clergy were 
learned, resolute, and able, and their strong but nar- 
row minds burned with fanaticism and love of power." 



CHAPTER V. 

Ludlow's Attitude as an Assistant — Change of Views — His Defeat for 
the Governorship — Election of Haynes — Winthrop's Explana- 
tion — Ludlow's Objection — Overslaughed — Resolutions to 
Remove to Connecticut — The Removal — Its Real Cause — Lud- 
low, Hooker, Cotton, Stone — Ministerial Interference — Magis- 
terial Arrogance — Court and Commons. 

In the outset of the struggle between the 
magistrates and the commons, Ludlow, as one 
of the Assistants, stood with his associates in 
magnifying and undertaking to perpetuate the 
magisterial office ; so carrying out his protest, 
and guarding, as he thought, against encroach- 
ments on the functions and honors of the 
Court. But when the freemen set aside pre- 
vious corporate votes, demanded a sight of 
the charter, appointed advisers to the magis- 
trates — deputies — and made imperative their 
demands for recognition, Ludlow changed both 
his tactics and opinions, with other leaders, 
and made himself popular with the voters, as 
they elected him Deputy Governor in 1634, 

45 



46 ROGER LUDLOW 

with Dudley as Governor, when other advo- 
cates of the court party were left out of the 
magistracy. 

After four years of arduous service, with 
the strong hold Ludlow had secured on public 
confidence by a successful administration of 
his high office, he had every reason to believe 
that in the general election, in May, 1635, ne 
would be advanced to the governorship. But 
he was defeated by Haynes, a rich land-owner 
from Essex, who came over with Hooker and 
Cotton in 1633, who was made an assistant in 
1634, and who had gained favor by advocating 
the lessening of taxes and other popular 
measures. 

Winthrop gives two reasons for the over- 
slaughing of Ludlow : " 1. Because the peo- 
ple would exercise their power. 2. Because 
Ludlow hotly condemned the action of the 
delegates for declaring an agreement on can- 
didates before they came to the meeting." 
They had held a caucus of the later style, and 
packed it with supporters of Haynes and Bel- 
lingham. Ludlow protested that such action 
made the election void ; but the voters ignored 
the protest, carried out their scheme, set aside 
the man fairly entitled to preferment, and 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 47 

conferred the governorship on a newcomer. 
Thus Massachusetts lost the services of one 
of her ablest men ; and Connecticut counted 
him among her pioneers, and is to this day en- 
joying the work of his hand in her unique 
constitution, her jurisprudence, her political 
and religious liberty defined by the rules of 
justice, equity, and good conscience. 

Scarcely had the solemn file of voters, bid- 
den to come in at one door of the meeting- 
house and go out at another, delivered their 
ballots down upon the table before the Gen- 
eral Court, and the old Governor had formally 
declared the election of the new officials, and 
all had gone their ways, — some to boast of 
their political finesse, some to gossip and 
wrangle, and some to quaff of sack or beer or 
strong waters, — when the defeated Deputy 
Governor resolved to have done with the 
Governor and Company of Massachusetts 
Bay, and open a new realm of adventure and 
achievement wherein he might win the honors 
he deserved and craved. And this was no 
new thought to him and to some of his asso- 
ciates. 

It had long been evident to Ludlow, 
Hooker, Stone, and other prominent colonists, 



48 ROGER LUDLOW 

that there was scant room in the Bay settle- 
ments or adjacent territories to accommodate 
the increasing number of immigrants, and 
there was great discontent among the people 
for various causes. The matter was often dis- 
cussed, and finally came to official considera- 
tion in the General Court. The ostensible 
causes of the removal to Connecticut were 
simply put by its advocates. They argued — 
for argument's sake — that they had no ac- 
commodation for their cattle and could not 
support their minister or receive more friends ; 
that Connecticut was large and productive, 
and was in danger of occupation by the 
Dutch or by other Englishmen. To these 
propositions Winthrop and others made 
answer, that all the Bay people were knit in 
one body, and bound to seek the welfare of 
the Commonwealth ; that both the state and 
civil polity forbade the removal ; that the 
colony was weak and in danger from the 
Dutch and Indians and from the hostility of 
the home government ; and, lastly, that 
Hooker would draw away many with him. 

There was a division in the General C ^irt 
on the question, and a day was appointed for 
fasting, prayer, and humiliation. Hooker was 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 49 

asked to preach the sermon, but, on his in- 
stant excuse of unfitness for the occasion (for 
the reason that he had resolved to go to Con- 
necticut), Cotton was called upon, and his ex- 
emplification of the text, " The removing of a 
candlestick is a great matter which is to be 
avoided," seems to have given brief pause to 
the agitation. 

But neither fasting, humiliation, nor prayer, 
nor fervid doctrinal appeals, could turn " the 
strong bent of their spirits to remove hither." 
The controlling factors in the whole situation, 
apart from the points of discussion in the 
General Court, and out of it, lay in the fact 
that men of masterful purposes, of broad 
views of human rights, of faith in democratic 
principles, could not brook the church mem- 
bership test of suffrage, the exclusiveness and 
the arrogance of the magisterial and ministe- 
rial interference and dictation in public and 
private affairs. There was no room for the 
accommodation of views, the building of a free 
state, in the narrow field of controversy be- 
tween the party lines of court and commons. 



CHAPTER VI. 

The Valley of the Long River — Knowledge of its Resources — 
Block — Wahginnacut — Oldham — The Leave to Remove — Cam- 
bridge — Watertown — Dorchester — Commission to Govern the 
New Colony — Ludlow Made its Head — The Agreement — Its 
Text — Trumbull's Definition. 

The valley of the long river was not an un- 
known country to the men of the new emigra- 
tion. Accounts of its fertility, its varied 
resources, its abundance of corn and furs, from 
Indians, explorers, traders, and scouts, in their 
journeyings thither by land and water, had 
been carried to the Bay colonists, and were 
well known in England. From the Dutch 
captain's report of his expedition among the 
Sequins in 1614; from the appeal of the na- 
tives driven forth by the " potencie of the 
Pequents " ; from the glowing descr ntion of 
the sachem Wahginnacut, who came first to 
Ludlow and had dined with Governor Win- 
throp and the magistrates, and had urged the 
English to come to his country ; from the 

50 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 51 

stories of Hall and others who had taken 
the five-days journey ; of Holmes, who had 
sailed up the river, defied the Dutch, and es- 
tablished a post at Windsor ; of Oldham, the 
reckless adventurer, with his personal knowl- 
edge of the region, who had chosen a site for 
a settlement at Wethersfield ; and from other 
sources, there had come to be such an ac- 
quaintance with the new land — Connecticut — 
at the time of the removal of the three towns, 
as to invite a sharp struggle, diplomatic and 
otherwise, for first occupation and supremacy 
there between the men of Massachusetts, of 
Plymouth, and of the new company of " lords 
and gentlemen" under the Saltonstall patent, 
with young Winthrop at its head. Nor were 
the hardships and dangers of the new coloniza- 
tion lost sight of, not only from the fierce hos- 
tility of the Dutch and Indians, but from 
pestilence, famine and the terrible rigors of 
winter, and all the hazards that wait on new- 
comers in the wilderness. 

At the General Court, in September, 1634, 
Massachusetts confirmed the leaves to remove 
to the three towns, Cambridge, Watertown, 
and Dorchester ; but hedged her consent about 
with nominal conditions of sovereignty and 



52 ROGER LUDLOW 

allegiance, not so much from any claim of 
jurisdiction by reason of the patent, as from 
the desire of the people about to remove for 
some frame of government for their protec- 
tion ; and, with some minor preliminary or- 
ders and grants, the movement began, and 
Connecticut was formally designated as the 
field of the new colonization. 

" P r vided they continue still vnd r this 
gou r mt," was the stipulation in each license 
to remove ; and in March, 1636, the General 
Court of Massachusetts instituted a pro- 
visional government under a commission to 
certain persons who " had resolved to trans- 
plant themselves and their estates unto the 
river of Connecticut." Diverse views are held 
as to the scope and purpose of this commis- 
sion ; but the learned historian, the late Dr. J. 
Hammond Trumbull, in his " Note on the 

Constitutions of Connecticut" thus defines it : 

I 

" It was in fact an agreement ratified ii the presence 
of the Massachusetts General Court, between the 
founders of Connecticut and the representatives of the 
Earl of Warwick's grantees, who, as the instrument sets 
forth, had sometime engaged themselves and their 
estates in the planting of the river of Connecticut, and 
had already made a beginning at Saybrook." 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 53 

This was the text of the commission 
u graunted to severall P r sons to governe the 
People att Con n ecticott fr the Space of a Yeare 
nowe nexte comeing :" 

" Whereas, vpon some reason & grounds, there are to 
remoue from this o r Comonwealth & body of the Matta- 
chusetts in America dyv r s of o r loveing ffriends,, 
neighb's, freemen & members of Newe Towne, Dor- 
chest 1 , Waterton, & other places, whoe are resolved to 
transplant themselues & their estates vnto the Ryver of 
Cofiecticott, there to reside & inhabite, & to that end 
dyv rs are there already, & dyv rs others shortly to goe, 
wee, in this present Court assembled, on the behalfe of 
o r said memb rs , & John Winthrop, Jun r , Esq', Gouern% 
appoyncted by certaine noble personages & men of. 
quallitie interested in the said ryv r , w ch are yet in Eng- 
land, on their behalfe, have had a serious consideracon 
there[on], & thinke it meete that where there are a peo- 
ple to sitt down & cohabite, there will followe, vpon 
occacon, some cause of difference, as also dyvers mis- 
deamean rs , w ch will require a speedy redresse ; & in re- 
gard of the distance of place, this state and gouernm' 
cannot take notice of the same as to apply timely 
remedy, or to dispence equall iustice to them & their 
affaires, as may be desired ; & in regard the said noble 
p'sonages and men of qualitie haue something ingaged 
themselues & their estates in the planting of the said 
ryver, & by vertue of a pattent, doe require jurisdiccon 
of the said place & people, & neither the mindes of the 
said p'sonages (they being writ vnto) are as yet knowen, 
nor any manner of gouernm* is yet agreed on, & there 



54 ROGER LUDLOW 

being a necessitie, as aforesaid, that some present 
gouernm' may be obserued, therefore thinke meete, & 

soe order, that Roger Ludlowe, Esq r , Will™ Pin- 



chon, Esq r , John Steele, Will™ Swaine, Henry Smyth, 
Will m Phelps, Will" Westwood, & Andrewe Ward, or 
the great' pte of them, shall haue full power & aucthor- 
itie to hear & determine in a judiciall way, by witnesses 
vpon oathe examine, w th [in] the said plantaCon, all those 
differences w ch may arise between partie & partie, as 
also, vpon misdemean r , to inflicte corporall punishm' or 
imprisonm', to ffine & levy the same if occacon soe re- 
quire, to make & decree such orders, for the present, 
that may be for the peaceable and quiett ordering the 
affaires of the said plantacon, both in tradeing, plant- 
ing, building, lotts, millitarie dissipline, defensiue 
warr (if neede soe require), as shall best conduce 
to the publique goode of the same, & that the 

[and others], or the greater 



said 



Roger Ludlowe 



p r te of them, shall haue power, vnder the great 1 parte 
of their ha[nds], att a day or dayes by them ap- 
poyncted, vpon convenient not[ice], to convent the 
said inhabitants of the said townes.to any convenient 
place that they shall thinke meete, n a legall & open 
manner, by way of Court, to proceede in execute[ing] 
the power & aucthoritie aforesaide, & in case of present 
necessitie, two of them ioyneing togeather, to inflict cor- 
porall punishm* vpon any offender if they see good & 
warrantable ground soe to doe ; provided, alwayes, that 
this comission shall not extende any longer time than 
one whole yeare from the date thereof, & in the meane 
time it shalbe lawfull for this Court to recall the said 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 55 

presents if they see cause, and if soe be there may be a 
mutuall and setled gouernm* condiscended vnto by & 
with the goode likeing & consent of the saide noble 
personages, or their agents, the inhabitants, & this 
comonwealthe ; provided, also, that this may not be any 
preiudice to the interest of those noble personages in 
the s d ryver & confines thereof within their seuerall 
lymitts." 

How should the new colony be governed ? 
Who should govern it ? who should settle the 
rivalries of the factions striving for possession 
of the new territory, and hold with strong hand 
the key of the situation ? who should solve the 
intricate problems to arise, by the light of law 
and equity, of sound judgment born of experi- 
ence ? who was well versed in precedents and 
principles in the conduct of state affairs ? who 
knew the underlying purposes of the people of 
the three towns, and could best adapt them to 
the great ends held in view from the begin- 
ning ? Questions these of first importance in 
the minds of men to whom, in law at least, 
Church and State were one. 

The General Court of Massachusetts an- 
swered these questions by placing Roger 
Ludlow — just denied his promotion to the 
governorship — at the head of this commis- 
sion, with its broad discretionary powers. This 



56 ROGER LUDLOW 

preferment demonstrated that his defeat in the 
election was for political, and not for personal, 
reasons ; that it was a popular choice from the 
strong men of the three towns, ratified by the 
General Court, to leadership in a field wherein 
all might find a wider range for the liberty they 
were hungry to exercise, — the democratic 
right of self-government. 



CHAPTER VII. 

Ludlow's Initiative — Occupation — Conflicting Interests — Indians — 
Dutch — Plymouth Men — Saltonstall's Company — Ludlow's 
Firmness and Diplomacy — "Ye Controversie " — Underfill's 
Notice — Brewster's Letter — Vane's Demand — First Comers — 
First Winter — Sufferings and Losses — Spring of 1636 — Organi- 
zation of Court — Laws and Ordinances — Important Measures — 
Administration of Justice — Ludlow de Facto Governor and 
Chief Justice — The Massachusetts " Agreement " Fulfilled. 

From the beginning, in 1630, Ludlow had 
been identified with the interests of the people 
of Dorchester ; and now this " principal lay 
citizen," well knowing that possession was nine 
points of the law (and he alone of the commis- 
sion from Massachusetts knew what the law 
was), at once assumed the responsibility of 
organization, and the occupancy of the domain 
very dimly defined as " the Ryver of Conecti- 
cott " in the agreement. 

This was no easy task. It was one of finesse, 
of diplomacy, and finally one of arms. Who 
were the parties already represented there, 
and zealous to maintain their claims or rights ? 

57 



5 8 ROGER LUDLOW 

First, the Indians, — original land-owners and 
proprietors, — the Sequins and Nawaas of the 
river valley, hemmed in by the Mohawks on 
the west, and on the east by the conquerors of 
the river tribes, the Pequots, who could set a 
thousand warriors in the field ; the Dutch, 
who had discovered the country, bought lands 
of the natives, established trade with them, 
and built the " House of Hope " at Hart- 
ford, ten years before any Englishman came 
to the " Quonehtacut " ; the men of Plymouth, 
who had been treated with scant courtesy at 
Boston, as to the Connecticut occupation, and 
then had set up a trading house at Windsor, 
on lands purchased of the Indians ; and lastly, 
the company sent out by Saltonstall under the 
Say and Sele patent, which also sought to set- 
tle at Windsor, finding the pioneers from 
Plymouth in possession, and a party from Dor- 
chester breaking ground and arranging for the 
arrival of the people from that plantation. It 
was long before " ye controversie ended." 

It is needless to follow in detail the many 
steps to the end of the fierce and bitter strife 
for domination and ownership of the coveted 
lands. It resulted in the supremacy of the 
Dorchester claimants, by the withdrawal of 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 59 

the Dutch, the abandonment of their territo- 
rial claim by young Winthrop and his party 
and their settlement at Saybrook, and the ulti- 
mate driving out of the Plymouth men, with 
whom an adjustment was last made. 

" The trading house at the mouth of the Farmington, 
which William Holmes and his Plymouth company had 
built, despite the blustering of the Dutch, seemed to the 
practical, godly people of Dorchester set apart for their 
own uses ; and it became the rallying point of the con- 
gregation guided and inspired by John Wareham, and in 
secular affairs by Ludlow." 

Who won the victory in this contest for the 
Dorchester man ? Who stood unmoved in 
the storm of promises, persuasions, and threats, 
and with signal ability and tact and force held 
fast to the possession of their new homes, for 
the little band of his people, and saved them 
from disaster? Sir Richard Saltonstall an- 
swered these queries for all time in a let- 
ter describing the efforts of his company to 
seize the lands, when he said of Ludlow, " He 
was the cheffe man who hindered it." 

The Dutch cared more for trade than colon- 
ization ; and their claims of discovery, of pur- 
chase, of sovereignty, vanished when Capt. 



6o ROGER LUDLOW 

John Underhill pasted this notice on the doors 
of their " House of Hope," at Hartford : " I, 
John Underhill, do seize this house and land 
for the State of England, by virtue of the 
commission granted by the Providence Plan- 
tation " ; and the General Court of Connecti- 
cut sequestrated all the property, on its own 
authority, despite the duplicate sales and title 
deeds of the braggart captain. 

The demands of Saltonstall and his com- 
pany, represented by Francis Stiles and his 
men, instructed to impale in ground where 
Saltonstall appointed them, were set aside by 
the Dorchester pioneers under Ludlow, on 
the ground of prior right to this " Lord's 
waste and for the present altogether void of 
inhabitants." 

The real controversy as to the Dorchester 
usurpation is set in a clear light in a letter of 
Jonathan Brewster, the leader of the Ply- 
mouth men, who had been two years on the 
ground, and who had purchased from the 
Indians the open meadows — the bone of 
contention — on the right bank of the Con- 
necticut, from opposite Podunk River north- 
ward nearly seven miles. Brewster writes, July 
6, 1635 = 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 61 

"Ye Massachusetts men are coming almost daily, 
some by water, some by land, who are not yet deter- 
mined where to settle ; though some have a great mind 
to ye place we are upon. . . . What they will do I 
cannot yet resolve you. ... I shall do what I can 
to withstand them. ... I hope they will hear to rea- 
son, as we were here first, and bought the land, and have 
since held a chargeable possession." 

Small parties from the three Bay towns, 
Dorchester, Newtown, and Watertown, came 
to Connecticut, to choose locations, and make 
ready for their families in 1635 ; the chief im- 
migration taking place in 1636. Ludlow was 
among the first comers, that he might hurry 
on the Dorchester occupancy before stronger 
forces gathered from any source, and before 
Saltonstall's agent could get further instruc- 
tions from England. Matthew Grant, the sur- 
veyor, says he began to set out men's lots in 
1635, and a large one was allotted to Ludlow 
in this first distribution. 

When Sir Henry Vane, John Winthrop, 
Jr., and Hugh Peters demanded a " pertinent 
and plain answer from Mr. Ludlowe, Mr. Mav- 
erick, Mr. Newberry, and Mr. Stoughton, and 
the rest engaged in the business of Conn, plan- 
tation in the town of Dorchester," the answer 



62 ROGER LUDLOW 

was written in Ludlow's presence there, who 
had returned from the new plantation, after 
opening his campaign for possession, and was 
then supervising the departure, and in the 
busy stir of the people to join their friends 
on the river, — more than all, in the unyielding 
spirit of the men who had wrung from the 
government a reluctant leave to remove, and 
who counted in their ranks the ministers, sol- 
diers, statesmen, artisans, husbandmen, who 
were to plant the three towns, the nucleus of 
the State, and stand fast in the storm of war 
and the sunshine of peace. 

At the fall of winter in 1635, tne advance 
parties from Massachusetts were scattered 
along the river from Windsor to Wethersfield ; 
and the pioneers of the Saltonstall patentees 
were holding- out against the Dutch at the 
river's mouth. Snow came early to a great 
depth, food and clothing were lost en route, 
and the settlers suffered the extremes of hard- 
ship and privation. Some went back to their 
homes by land or water ; others withstood all 
perils and distress, and stayed through the 
winter. Among those who remained were 
some of Ludlow's Dorchester company with 
their families, who encamped in part near the 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 63 

Plymouth trading house, and in part in the 
open meadows on the east bank of the river. 
The whole country was covered with a dense 
primeval forest, save where the Indians had 
made clearings along the streams in the mea- 
dows, and cultivated them ; and this accounts 
for the bitter contest for the possession of the 
open meadow lands. They fared hard ; their 
supplies were soon gone ; game was scarce, 
and acorns and ground nuts were counted in 
their articles of food ; but they held on. 

Ludlow returned from Boston early in 1636, 
and was with the Dorchester people at Wind- 
sor, May 6, to open his duties as the head of 
the Massachusetts commission, defend his little 
colony from attacks, invent and put into oper- 
ation the machinery of government, and begin 
his career of nineteen years of service to his 
state. 

To govern the people was the first duty of 
the Massachusetts commission. The first 
court was promptly organized, and held at 
Hartford, May 1st, 1637, Ludlow presiding, 
with four lay associates — Steele, Phelps, 
Westwood, and Warde. These men never 
questioned their own authority ; and they ad- 
ministered the affairs of the plantations, civil 



64 ROGER LUDLOW 

and criminal, with a strong hand. Eight ses- 
sions of the court were held within a year ; the 
trained lawyer at the head framed the orders 
and decisions, and adapted the forms of pro- 
cedure suited to the doing of justice, with due 
order and dignity. 

The court dealt with serious matters from 
the beginning. These were some of the sub- 
jects of its orders : prohibition of sales of arms 
and ammunition to the Indians, appointment 
of constables and watchmen, formation of a 
church covenant by consent of other churches, 
the education of children, inventories and set- 
tlement of estates, military trainings, allotting 
and surveying lands, levying taxes, establish- 
ing town boundaries, fixing land damages, 
changing town names, and solemnly guarding 
the household against the proclivities and fas- 
cinations of the bachelors by an order that 
" Noe yonge man y l is neither married, nor 
hath any servants & be noe publicke officer, 
shall keepe howse by himself, without consent 
of the Towne where he lives first had, under 
paine of 20 s. p r weeke " ; and each master of 
a family who gave them " habitacon or inter- 
teinment," without consent of the town was 
subjected to the same penalty. Certainly a 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 65 

wide range of questions was this, for the deter- 
mination of a court in its first year, with dis- 
cretionary power and without appeal, and with 
no guide but its learning, love of exact justice, 
and sound common sense. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

A Crisis — "The Pequoitt Potencie" — Indian Atrocities — Declara- 
tion of War — Civilization vs. Barbarism — Mason's Expedition — 
The Fort Fight — Stone's Thanksgiving — Mason's Battle — 
Ludlow's Foresight — His Letter to Pynchon — The Swamp Fight 
Uncas and Miantonomo — Fair Unquowa — Ludlow's Services 
1635-1639 

Scarcely had the colonists in the three 
settlements on the river — Windsor, Hartford, 
and Wethersfield — made good their claims to 
ownership and occupancy under Ludlow's 
leadership, and set up their standards of inde- 
pendence under exigent laws and orders of their 
own making, when a crisis came -that threatened 
their destruction. Only instant, resolute action 
saved them. It was taken May 1, 1637. 

" It is ordered that there shalbe an offensive warr ag 1 
the Pequoitt, and that there shalbe 90 men levied out of 
the 3 Plantacons, Hartford, Weathersfield and Windsor 
(viz'), out of Hartford 42, Windsor 30, Weathersfield 18 : 
under the Comande of Captain Jo : Mason." 

In this order of the General Court held 
at Hartford is written the story of a great 

66 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 67 

tragedy, itself the outcome of lesser tragedies 
more poignant and terrible to their victims. 
The Pequots, enraged at the sale of lands on 
the river by the tribes they had conquered, 
resolved upon a war of extermination against 
the settlers. They had already opened their 
campaign of murder and assassination, arson, 
captivity, and torture. Ambush and surprise, 
torch, tomahawk, and scalping knife were the 
instruments of their hellish vengeance. 

This is but a partial record of Indian atroci- 
ties before the declaration of war : 

Murder of Captain Stone, and crew of twelve 
men, when going up the river to trade. 

Murder of two men above Saybrook, one, 
Brookfield, dying by torture. 

Mtirder of John Oldham, the founder of 
Wethersfield, at Block Island. 

Murder of Mitchell, brother of the Cam- 
bridge minister ; burned at the stake. 

Murder of two soldiers in the Saybrook 
cornfield ; bodies cut in halves and hung on 
trees. 

Attack on Gardiner's fort at Saybrook, in 
which he and two others were wounded, and 
two were killed. 

Massacre at Wethersfield, April 23, 1637, 



68 ROGER LUDLOW 

when one hundred Indians fell on the settlers 
at work in the fields, and killed one woman, 
one child, and seven men, and carried two 
young women into captivity. 

More than thirty English lives were sacri- 
ficed before the famous order was written. 

In the presence of such horrors, who values 
the sentimental charge that the war was cruel 
and unrighteous? It was civilization against 
barbarism. It was a mighty blow struck in 
self-defence, by a handful of settlers against a 
horde of demons ; sachem and sagamore 
against soldier and legist, sannup and squaw 
against husbandman and housewife ; war-drum 
against church-bell ; wickiup against meeting- 
house ; war-whoop against psalm ; savagery, 
squalor, devilish rites and incantations, against 
prayers, and hymns, and exhortations ; the 
native in his paint and feathers against the 
Englishman of sand with his pike and musket ; 
Sassacus and Sowheag, Tatobam and Sunck- 
quasson, against Ludlow and Hooker, Stone 
and Mason ; warfare, rapine and desolation 
against peace and plenty, enlightenment and 
culture, and all the social forces that bear 
fruitage under the sunlight of civilization. 

Down the river in " a pink a pinnace and a 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 69 

shallop " went the little company (seventy-seven 
in all when they went into action), and sailing 
eastward to Narragansett Bay, they landed, and 
after a wearisome and perilous march through 
the Narragansetts' country, with some scared 
and useless Indian auxiliaries and guides, in the 
early morning of May 26, 1637, they fell upon 
the sleeping Pequots in their fort on Pequot 
Hill, smote them hip and thigh, and wiped out 
between six and seven hundred warriors — the 
flower of their race, according to the Indians' 
own admission. It was courage and endurance 
that wrought the great deliverance. 

Ludlow presided at the court which declared 
the " offensive warr." It was chiefly due to him 
that the desperate task was undertaken. He 
knew the Indians in Massachusetts and Con- 
necticut ; he had studied their character, had a 
personal acquaintance with some of the chiefs, 
and was alive to the vital necessity of prompt 
action, of destroying the conspiracy at one bold 
stroke ; and it was done. 

Upon Ludlow chiefly fell the duty of de- 
fence of the settlers and their families, in the 
stockade at Windsor and along the river, while 
the soldiers were away on the Pequot expedi- 
tion. More than one-half of the fighting men 



7 o ROGER LUDLOW 

had gone. Watch and ward night and day, 
anxiety and alarm, waited on the little compa- 
nies in their villages until news of the victory 
brought relief. 

Deep are the pathos and devotion in his let- 
ter of those days to his friend Pynchon, in a 
like stress at Agawam, May 17, 1637. 

" I have received your letter, wherein you express that 
you are well fortified, but few hands. I would desire 
you to be careful and watchful that you be not betrayed 
by friendship. For my part, my spirit is ready to sink 
within me, when upon alarms which are daily I think of 
your condition ; that if the case be never so dangerous, 
we can neither help you nor you us. But I must confess 
both you and ourselves do stand merely by the power of 
our God : therefore he must and ought to have all the 
praise of it. I can assure you it is our great grief we 
can not, for our plantations are so gleaned by that small 
fleet we sent out that those that remain are not able to 
supply our watches, which are day and night, that our 
people are scarce able to stand upon their legs ; and for 
planting, we are in like condition with you ; what we 
plant is before our doors, little anywhere else. Our fleet 
went away tomorrow will be seven night." 

Westward, toward the Mohawk country, in 
the following July, fled the remnant of the 
Pequots, after the battle at their stronghold ; 
and they finally stood at bay in a dense thicket 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 71 

in Fairfield. Ludlow was present at this so- 
called " Swamp Fight," having joined the forces 
of Mason and Stoughton and their Indian 
allies at Saybrook. After a gallant defence, 
several of the sachems and warriors were killed ; 
about two hundred prisoners were taken and al- 
lotted to the Mohegans and Narragansetts, and 
an end forever put to the " Pequoitt Potencie" ; 
and after the death of the noted Sassacus, a 
compact of peace was made at Hartford with 
Uncas and Miantonomo, by the magistrates of 
Connecticut in behalf of the colonies, under 
which full mastery was given to the English, 
until King Philip's war. It was not a "bene- 
volent assimilation." 

It was on this march, and in scouting the 
adjacent country, that Englishmen first saw the 
beautiful region about Quinnipiac. Fair Un- 
quowa, "beyond Pequannocke," with its hills 
and streams, rich intervales and forest lands, 
captured the imagination of Ludlow. At the 
earliest moment he made another visit there, 
sent out some planters from Windsor, and 
there he stood for his last service to his state, 
when in his conscientious and hazardous de- 
fence of this frontier post against the Dutch 
and Mohawks he was left alone, and made the 



72 ROGER LUDLOW 

target of criticism and reproof by his associates 
in office. 

Ludlow's services to Connecticut, from the 
inception of its colonization to the adoption of 
the Fundamental Orders at Hartford, Jan. 14, 
1639, — as shown in a later summary, — were of 
the highest order, and always equal to the 
greatest demands upon his experience, tact, 
courage, foresight, and judicial qualities. 

What was his share in that great historic 
work, his honor on that great history-making 
day in this commonwealth, — its birthday two 
hundred and sixty years ago, when the colo- 
nists came to declare their independence ? 



CHAPTER IX. 

The Fundamental Orders — No Record — None Desired — Opinions 
of Hoadley and Trumbull — At their Adoption — Leaders- 
New Chapter in History — Text of the Constitution — Law of 
the People — Views of Jurists and Historians — Bancroft — 
Palfrey — Fiske — Green — Tarbox — Bryce — Sanford — 
Trumbull — Robinson — Johnston — Hamersley — Bushnell — 
Day — Brinley. 

No record exists of the proceedings at the 
adoption of the constitution of 1639, but tne 
constitution itself. No record of the court, no 
report of the debates, is known to history. It 
is the judgment of the most learned scholars, 
Dr. Charles J. Hoadley and the late Dr. J. 
Hammond Trumbull, that the men who were 
foremost in that great matter desired that no 
record of the transactions should be preserved ; ^ 
that they knew the Fundamental Orders would 
explain themselves — they needed no interpre- 
ter ; that in letter and spirit they would find 
instant response and approval in the minds and 
hearts of the people ; and it was so. It has 

73 



74 ROGER LUDLOW 

been justly called a self-appointed constitu- 
tion. 

But there were other reasons for the silence 
of the records. England was watchful and 
suspicious of this vigorous infant colony ; and 
the commission from Massachusetts had ex- 
pired. The men of the three towns were a 
law only to themselves. It is known that they 
were in earnest for the establishment of a gov- 
ernment on broad lines ; and it is certain that 
the ministers and captains, the magistrates and 
men of affairs, forceful in the settlements from 
the beginning, were the men who took the 
lead, guided the discussions, and found the 
root of the whole matter in the first written 
declaration of independence in these historic 
orders. Who were they ? Surely these men 
were there : From Windsor, Ludlow, Mason, 
Hull, Phelps, and Marshall ; from Wethers- 
field, Mitchell, Ward, Raynor, Plum, and Hub- 
bard ; from Hartford, Haynes, Hooker, Welles, 
Webster, Talcott, Steele, and Hopkins. With 
these leaders in thought and action are grouped 
other strong personalities : Wareham, Ros- 
siter, Wolcott, Seeley, Wyllys, Allyn, Chester, 
Bull, and Goodwin, — all the chief planters of 
the towns (not alone the dignitaries of the 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 75 

General Court, as some authorities hold), — 
inspired, providentially directed, to one great 
purpose. They wrote a new chapter in the 
world's history on that day, January 14, 1639. 
It was this : 

THE CONSTITUTION OF 1639. 

Forasmuch as it hath pleased the Allmighty God by 
the wise disposition of his diuyne providence so to Order 
and dispose of things that we the Inhabitants and Resi- 
dents of Windsor, Harteford and Wethersfield are now 
cohabiting and dwelling in and vppon the River of Con- 
ectecotte and the Lands thereunto adioyneing ; And 
well knowing where a people are gathered togather the 
word of God requires that to mayntayne the peace and 
vnion of a such people there should be an orderly and 
decent Gouerment established according to God, to 
order and dispose of the affayres of the people at all 
seasons as occation shall require ; doe therefore asso- 
ciate and conioyne our selues to be as one Publike State 
or Commonwelth ; and doe, for our selues and our Suc- 
cessors and such as shall be adioyned to vs att any tyme 
hereafter, enter into Combination and Confederacon to- 
gather, to mayntayne and presearue the liberty and pur- 
ity of the gospell of our Lord Jesus which we now 
professe, as also the disciplyne of the Churches, which 
according to the truth of the said gospell is now prac- 
tised amongst vs ; As also in our Ciuell Affaires to be 
guided and gouerned according to such Laws, Rules, 
Orders and decrees as shall be made, ordered & decreed, 
as followeth : 



7 6 ROGER LUDLOW 

i. It is ordered, sentenced and decreed, that there 
shall be yerely two generall Assemblies or Courts, the 
first on the second thursday in Aprill, the other the sec- 
ond thursday in September, following : the first shall be 
called the Courte of Election, wherein shall be yerely 
Chosen from tyme to tyme soe many Magestrats and 
other publike Officers as shall be found requisitte ; 
Whereof one to be chosen Gouernour for the yeare ensue- 
ing and vntill another be chosen, and noe other Mages- 
trate to be chosen for more than one yeare ; provided 
alwayes there be sixe chosen besids the Gouernour ; 
which being chosen and sworn according to an Oath re- 
corded for that purpose shall haue power to administer 
justice according to the Lawes here established, and for 
want thereof according to the rule of the word of God ; 
which choise shall be made by all that are admitted free- 
men and haue taken the Oath of Fidellity, and doe co- 
habitte within this Jurisdiction (hauing beene admitted 
Inhabitants by the major part of the Towne wherein 
they Hue) or the mayor parte of such as shall be then 
present. 

2. It is Ordered, sentensed and decreed, that the 
Election of the aforesaid Magestrats shall be on this 
manner : euery person present and quallified for choyse 
shall bring in (to the persons deputed to receaue them) 
one single paper with the name of him written in yt whom 
he desires to haue Gouernour, and he that hath the 
greatest number of papers shall be Gouernour for that 
yeare. And the rest of the Magestrats or publike Offi- 
cers to be chosen in this manner : The Secretary for the 
tyme being shall first read the names of all that are to be 
put to choise and then shall seuerally nominate them 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 77 

distinctly, and euery one that would haue the person nom- 
inated to be chosen shall bring in one single paper written 
vppon, and he that would not haue him chosen shall 
bring in a blanke ; and euery one that hath more written 
papers than blanks shall be a Magestrat for that yeare ; 
which papers shall be receaued and told by one or more 
that shall be then chosen by the court and sworne to be 
faythfull therein ; but in case there should not be sixe 
chosen as aforesaid, besids the Gouernour, out of those 
which are nominated, then he or they which haue the 
most written papers shall be a Magestrate or Magestrats 
for the ensuing yeare, to make vp the aforesaid number. 

3. It is Ordered, sentenced and decreed, that the 
Secretary shall not nominate any person, nor shall any 
person be chosen newly into the Magestracy which was 
not propownded in some Generall Courte before, to be 
nominated the next Election ; and to that end yt shall 
be lawfull for ech of the Townes aforesaid by their 
deputyes to nominate any two whom they conceaue fitte 
to be putte to Election ; and the Courte may ad so many 
more as they judge requissitt. 

4. It is Ordered, sentenced and decreed that noe 
person be chosen Gouernor aboue once in two yeares, 
and that the Gouernor be always a member of some ap- 
proved congregation and formerly of the Magestracy 
within this Jurisdiction ; and all the Magestrats Freemen 
of this Commonwelth ; and that no Magestrate or other 
publike officer shall execute any parte of his or their 
Office before they are seuerally sworne, which shall be 
done in the face of the Courte if they be present, and in 
case of absence by some deputed for that purpose. 

5. It is Ordered, sentenced and decreed, that to 



78 ROGER LUDLOW 

the aforesaid Courte of Election the seuerall Townes 
shall send their deputyes, and when the Elections are 
ended they may proceed in any publike searuice as at 
other Courts. Also the other Generall Courte in 
September shall be for makeing of lawes, and any other 
publike occation which conserns the good of the 
Commonwelth. 

6. It is Ordered, sentenced and decreed, that the 
Gouernor shall, either by himselfe or by the secretary, 
send out summons to the Constables of euery Towne for 
the cauleing of these two standing Courts, one month at 
lest before their seuerall tymes ; And also if the Gouer- 
nor and the gretest parte of the Magestrats see cause 
vppon any spetiall occation to call a generall Courte, 
they may giue order to the secretary soe to doe within 
fowerteene dayes warneing ; and if vrgent necessity 
so require, vppon a shorter notice, giueing sufficient 
grownds for yt to the deputyes when they meete, or els 
be questioned for the same ; And if the Gouernor and 
Mayor parte of Magestrats shall ether neglect or refuse 
to call the two Generall standing Courts or ether of them, 
as also at other tymes when the occations of the Com- 
monwelth require, the Freemen thereof, or the Mayor 
parte of them, shall petition to them soe to doe ; if then 
yt be ether denyed or neglected the said Freemen or the 
Mayor parte of them shall haue power to giue order to 
the Constables of the seuerall Townes to doe the same, 
and so may meete togather, and chuse to themselues a 
Moderator, and may proceed to do any Acte of power, 
which any other Generall Courte may. 

7. It is Ordered, sentenced and decreed that after 
there are warrants giuen out for any of the said Generall 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 79 

Courts, the Constable or Constables of ech Towne shall 
forthwith give notice distinctly to the inhabitants of the 
same, in some Publike Assembly or by goeing or sending 
from howse to howse, that at a place and tyme by him or 
them lymited and sett, they meet and assemble them- 
selues togather to elect and chuse certen deputyes to be 
att the Generall Courte then following to agitate the 
afayres of the commonwelth ; which said Deputyes 
shall be chosen by all that are admitted Inhabitants in 
the seuerall Townes and haue taken the oath of fidellity ; 
prouided that non be chosen a Deputy for any Generall 
Courte which is not a Freeman of this Commonwelth. 

The aforesaid deputyes shall be chosen in manner fol- 
lowing : euery person that is present and quallified as 
before expressed, shall bring the names of such, written 
in seuerall papers, as they desire to haue chosen for that 
Imployment, and these 3 or 4, more or lesse, being the 
number agreed on to be chosen for that tyme, that haue 
greatest number of papers written for them shall be 
deputyes for that Courte ; whose names shall be endorsed 
on the backe side of the warrant and returned into the 
Courte, with the Constable or Constables hand vnto the 
same. 

8. It is Ordered, sentenced and decreed, that Wynd- 
sor, Hartford and Wethersfield shall haue power, 
ech Towne, to send fower of their freemen as their 
deputyes to euery Generall Courte ; and whatsoeuer 
other Townes shall be hereafter added to this Jurisdic- 
tion, they shall send so many deputyes as the Courte 
shall judge meete, a reasonable proportion to the number 
of freemen that are in the said Townes being to be 
attended therein ; which deputyes shall haue the power 



80 ROGER LUDLOW 

of the whole Towne to giue their voats and alowance to 
all such lawes and orders as may be for the publike good, 
and unto which the said Townes are to be bownd. 

9. It is Ordered and decreed, that the deputyes thus 
chosen shall haue power and liberty to appoynt a tyme 
and place of meeting togather before any Generall 
Courte to aduise and consult of all such things as may 
concerne the good of the publike, as also to examine 
their owne Elections, whether according to the order, 
and if they or the greatest parte of them find any such 
election to be illegall they may seclud such for present 
from their meeting, and relurne the same and their 
resons to the Courte ; and if yt proue true, the Courte 
may fyne the party or partyes so intruding and the 
Towne, if they see cause, and giue out a warrant to goe 
to a newe election in a legall way, either in parte or in 
whole. Also the said deputyes shall haue power to fyne 
any that shall be disorderly at their meetings, or for not 
comming in due tyme or place according to appoynt- 
ment ; and they may returne the said fynes into the 
Courte if yt be refused to be paid, and the Tresurer to 
take notice of yt, and to estreete or levy the same as 
he does other fynes. 

10. It is Ordered, sentenced and decreed, that euery 
Generall Courte, except such as through neglect of the 
Gouernor and the greatest parte of Magestrats the Free- 
men themselves doe call, shall consist of the Gouernor, 
or some one chosen to moderate the Courte, and 4 
other Magestrats at lest, with the mayor parte of the 
deputyes of the seuerall Townes legally chosen ; and in 
case the Freemen or mayor parte of them, through neg- 
lect or refusall of the Gouernor and mayor parte of the 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 81 

magestrats, shall call a Courte, yt shall consist of the 
mayor parte of Freemen that are present or their 
deputyes, with a Moderator chosen by them : In which 
said Generall Courts shall consist the supreme power of 
the Commonwelth, and they only shall haue power to 
make lawes or repeale them, to graunt leuyes, to admitt of 
Freemen, dispose of lands vndisposed of, to seuerall 
Townes or persons, and also shall haue power to call 
ether Courte or Magestrate or any other person whatso- 
euer into question for any misdemeanour, and may for 
just causes displace or deale otherwise according to the 
nature of the offence ; and also may deale in any other 
matter that concerns the good of this commonwelth, 
excepte election of Magestrats, which shall be done by 
the whole boddy of Freemen. 

In which Courte the Gouernour or Moderator shall 
haue power to order the Courte to giue liberty of spech, 
and silence vnceasonable and disorderly speakeings, to 
put all things to voate, and in case the voate be equall 
to haue the casting voice. But none of these Courts 
shall be adiorned or dissolued without the consent of 
the maior parte of the Courte. 

ii. It is ordered, sentenced and decreed, that when 
any Generall Courte vppon the occations of the Com- 
monwelth haue agreed upon any summe or summes of 
mony to be leuyed vppon the seuerall Townes within 
this Jurisdiction, that a Committee be chosen to sett out 
and appoynt what shall be the proportion of euery 
Towne to pay of the said leuy, provided the Committees 
be made vp of an equal number out of each Towne. 

14th January, 1639, the 11 Orders abouesaid are 
voted. 

6 



82 ROGER LUDLOW 

Jurists, historians, and scholars accord to 
these Fundamental Orders a unique place 
among political constitutions. And justly so, 
since they are inseparable from any intelligent 
appreciation of the character and motives of 
the men who inspired, framed, and adopted 
them ; and they underlie all the American 
declarations of the rights of man, the organic 
law of the state and the nation, the law and 
the gospel of government by the people. 

What some of the authorities say : 

" From this seed sprang the constitution of Connecti- 
cut, first in the series of written American constitutions 
framed by the people, for the people. . . . 

" Nearly two centuries have elapsed ; the world has 
been wiser by various experience ; political institutions 
have become the theme on which the most powerful 
and cultivated minds have been employed ; dynasties of 
kings have been dethroned, recalled, dethroned again, 
and so many constitutions have been framed or re- 
formed, stifled or subverted, that memory may despair 
of a completed catalogue : but the people of Connecti- 
cut have found no reason to deviate from the govern- 
ment established by their fathers." — Bancroft : History 
of the United States. 

" It was the first written constitution known to history, 
that created a government." — Fiske : Beginnings of New 
England. 

" The whole constitution was that of an independent 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 83 

state. It continued in force, with very little alteration, 
a hundred and eighty years." — Palfrey : History of New 
England. 

" This constitution defined the laws, rules and regula- 
tions of a government created by the people." — Tarbox : 
Organization of Civil Government. 

" The eleven fundamental orders, with their preamble, 
present the first example in history of a written constitu- 
tion." — Green : Short History of the English People. 

" The oldest truly political constitution in America is 
the instrument called the Fundamental Orders of Con- 
necticut, framed by the inhabitants of Windsor, Hart- 
ford and Wethersfield in 1638, — memorable year, when 
the ecclesiastical revolt of Scotland saved the liberties 
of England." — Bryce : American Commonwealth. 

" One of the most free and happy constitutions of civil 
government." — Trumbull : History of Connecticut. 

" The first constitution ever written and adopted by 
the suffrages of a people." — Sanford : History of Con- 
necticut. 

" No king, no congress, presided over its birth ; its 
seed was in the three towns. So far as its provisions are 
concerned, the King, the Parliament, the Warwick 
grant, the Say and Sele grant, might as well have been 
non-existent : Connecticut was as absolutely a state in 
1639 as in 1776." — Johnston : History of Connecticut. 

" In this instrument, quaint in phrase, but strangely 
comprehensive in thought, reverent to God but aggres- 
sive and bold to all human beings of rank and authority, 



84 ROGER LUDLOW 

we have the first written constitution in history, adopted 
by a free people, which asked consent from no king and 
recognized no earthly allegiance but to the sovereign 
commonwealth." — Robinson, H. C. : Connecticut Consti- 
tution. 

" This remarkable document has been called, and 
with a certain import truly called, the first written con- 
stitution. It did, however, formulate into solemn dec- 
laration one of the two essential principles assumed to 
be axiomatic by the American idea of government ; /. e., 
sovereignty, by virtue of the divine will and law, resides 
in the people, who set the bounds and limitations of the 
power they entrust to officers and magistrates." — Ham- 
ersley : Connecticut : Origin of her Constitution and 
Laws. 

" The Connecticut constitution of 1638-9 is the foun- 
dation of the republican institutions of the colony and 
state. It may claim, on higher considerations the atten- 
tion of students of political science and general history." 
— Trumbull, J. H. : Blue Laws — True and False. 

" The first properly American constitution, — a work in 
which the framers were permitted to give body and 
shape, for the first time, to the genuine republican idea, 
that dwelt as an actuating force or inmost sense in all 
the New England colonies. . . . 

" The first one written out as a complete frame of 
civil order in the new world embodies all the essential 
features of the constitutions of our states, and of the Re- 
public itself as they exist at the present day." — Bush- 
nell : Historic Estimate. 

" It was not the intention of the framers of the consti- 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 85 

tution to abrogate all the existing laws and institutions. 
They intended only to improve what was defective, to 
supply what was deficient, and to render certain what 
was uncertain." — 1st Connecticut Report, Day's Preface. 

" But fifteen years before the ' Instrument of Govern- 
ment ' was framed in England, and eighteen years before 
Vane's proposition of a ' fundamental constitution,' on 
January 14, 1639, the first constitution of Connecticut 
was adopted by a general assembly of the planters of the 
three towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield. 
This was in fact the first written constitution, in the 
modern sense of the term, known to history." — Old South 
Leaflet. 

" This remarkable document gave to Connecticut the 
preeminent place in constitutional history. It established 
a democracy pure and simple, recognizing neither King, 
Lords, or Parliament, nor owning dependence upon any 
power on earth. It was the constitution of an independ- 
ent state, a distinct organic law constituting a govern- 
ment and defining its powers. It declared in plain 
terms that the general court shall constitute the supreme 
power of the commonwealth, and the general court 
was to be elected annually by the freemen." — Brinley's 
Prefatory Note, Reprint Laws of 1673. 

" Historians concede that the first written constitution 
of representative government ordained by men was 
agreed on by the inhabitants of the three towns, Wind- 
sor, Hartford and Wethersfield — 250 years ago. . . . 
Never had a company of men deliberately met to frame 
a social compact constituting a new and independent 
commonwealth with definite officers, executive and 



86 ROGER LUDLOW 

legislative, and prescribed rules and modes of govern- 
ment, until the first planters of Connecticut came together 
for the great work on January 14, 1638-9. . . . This 
daring spring into political independence could only have 
proceeded from men accustomed to some self-created 
form of public organization . . ." — Baldwin : Three 
Constitutions of Connecticut. 



CHAPTER X. 

Who Inspired the Constitution — Hooker — The Sermon — Wolcott's 
Notes — Trumbull's Interpretation — Doctrine — Reasons — 
Historical Estimates — Johnston — Fiske — Elliott — Twichell — 
Walker — Who Wrote the Constitution — Ludlow — His Qualifi- 
cations — Opinions — Hollister — Tuttle — Stiles — Bancroft — 
Schenck — Trumbull — Walker — Elliott — Hawes — Robinson — 
Brinley — Beers — Waters — Hooker Visioned and Ludlow 
Wrote the Fundamental Orders. 

In the absence of all record evidence, any 
estimate of an individual's share or influ- 
ence in making the constitution of 1639 must 
be one of conjecture and comparison rather 
than of demonstration. From a single source, 
a ray of light shines through the historic lines, 
and marks one of the sources of their inspira- 
tion. It falls on the stalwart figure of a min- 
ister of the First Church in Hartford, great in 
his calling, — Thomas Hooker. He was a Non- 
conformist, driven out of England by Laud's 
pursuivants, frozen out of Massachusetts by the 
oligarchy of magistrates and clerical brethren, 

37 



88 ROGER LUDLOW 

and made a democrat, a hater of tyranny and 
absolutism, an opportunist in the highest sense, 
when here in Connecticut a way providentially 
opened to him to vision the rights of a people 
who would be truly free ; and withal great 
enough never in book or sermon, by voice or 
pen, so far as history discloses, to make claim 
to prophecy or honor above his fellows or 
friends who dared with him, in the face of 
kingship and its royal grants, to write the 
first declaration of independence. It is only 
in the vociferous laudations of some recent 
writers that the historic orders are described 
as " Hooker's constitution." 

For two hundred and twenty-two years after 
the constitution was written, the honors of its 
authorship were in general given to Haynes, 
Hooker, and Ludlow. 

Then the late Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull 
deciphered and interpreted some notes of lec- 
tures and sermons delivered in Windsor and 
Hartford from April, 1638, to April, 1641, 
made by Henry Wolcott, Jr., of Windsor, in a 
note book now one of the treasures of the 
Connecticut Historical Society. One of these 
sermons was preached by Mr. Hooker, May 
31, 1638, before the General Court ; and under 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 89 

the heads "Doctrine" and "Reasons," Wol- 
cott sets down in his manuscript, in a quaint 
alphabet and in arbitrary signs, these proposi- 
tions from the lips of the preacher : 

" Doctrine."— I. That the choice of the public magis- 
trates belongs unto the people by God's own 
allowance. 

II. The privilege of election, which be- 
longs to the people, therefore must not be 
exercised according to their humors, but 
according to the blessed will and law of God. 

III. They who have the power to appoint 
officers and magistrates, it is in their power, 
also, to set the bounds and limitations of the 
power and place into which they call them. 

" Reasons." — I. Because the foundation of authority is 
laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people. 

II. Because, by a free choice, the hearts of 
the people will be more inclined to the love 
of the persons (chosen), and more ready to 
yield (obedience). 

III. Because of that duty and engagement 
of the people. 

Upon these broad "doctrines" of liberty, 
foretokened in an earlier letter to Governor 
Winthrop, and novel in that exact form to all 
the world, — save the freemen of the Connecti- 
cut plantation, — rests the constitution. So 



go ROGER LUDLOW 

runs the consensus of opinion between writers 
of colonial history who, hypercritical, accord 
too little honor to Hooker, and those who, 
overzealed, accord too much. 

The truth is made plain in the equipoise of 
these scholarly opinions : 

" It is on the banks of the Connecticut, under the 
mighty preaching of Thomas Hooker, and in the consti- 
tution to which he gave life, if not form, that we draw 
the first breath of that atmosphere which is now so famil- 
iar to us." — Johnston : History of Connecticut. 

" It marked the beginnings of American democracy, 
of which Thomas Hooker deserves more than any other 
man to be called the father." — Fiske : Begi?inings of New 
England. 

" In so few and such words did young Mr. Wolcott of 
Windsor set down the substance of that great manifesto 
of liberty, how little deeming that his jottings are the 
sole record by which more than two centuries later it 
shall be redeemed from oblivion, and laurel with new 
and imperishable honor the memory of the divine and 
statesman who gave it voice." — Twichell : Winthrop. 

" The outline of principle and idea, the inspiration 
and spirit of them, were Thomas Hooker's." — Walker : 
First Church in Hartford. 

" The man who first visioned and did much to make 
possible our American democracy." — Elliott: History 
of New England. 

All this is true, historically true ; and still 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 91 

there remains a question of great interest and 
importance : Who wrote the Fundamental 
Orders, who framed this constitution of 1639? 
What sculptor gave form and expression to the 
preacher's inspiration? What artist, months 
after the "great manifesto," set in high lights, 
and colors the spirit, the purpose, the prophecy 
of the preacher's words ? Who embodied them 
in the stately lines of that great constitutional 
classic? Who engraved, in its exact legal 
phraseology, so much more than the sermonic 
"doctrines" and "reasons," the English Bible, 
the genius of the English common law, the 
idea of representative government, and the 
liberty of the individual ? It was the language 
of the court, and not of the pulpit ; of the law, 
not of the gospel ; of the legist, not of the 
theologian ; of a jurist and legislator, not of a 
minister and ecclesiast. 

The seeds of Hooker's sermon fell on fruit- 
ful soil. The doctrines were driven home with 
persuasive pulpit eloquence, and in the eight 
months that elapsed before the adoption of the 
constitution, there had come, through discus- 
sion and conviction and by contrast with 
previous conditions, in England and in Massa- 
chusetts, into the minds and hearts of the men 



9 2 ROGER LUDLOW 

of the three towns, Windsor, Hartford, and 
Wethersfield, an uplifting to the highest level 
of political thought and purpose, and a readi- 
ness, an eagerness, to make a fitting declara- 
tion, when in the fulness of time some strong 
man of their own choice should rise to give it 
utterance. 

Who so likely to meet their wishes and 
prove equal to the necessities of the situation 
as he who was chief adviser of their govern- 
ment, the centre of their activities, one whom 
they trusted in public affairs, their counsellor 
from the beginning: in le^al matters ? Ludlow 

o o o 

was chosen for this distinguished service. 
Such is the evidence from the most authorita- 
tive sources. There were many reasons for 
the choice, among them these, sufficient, even 
conclusive, in themselves : 

He was a lawyer, — the only one in the col- 
ony, — trained and learned in precedents and 
forms ; he had been a magistrate in Massachu- 
setts four years, serving in various offices from 
assistant to deputy governor, in the General 
Court ; he was chief of the Connecticut com- 
mission, and governor de facto ; he had drawn 
the main orders and acts of the colonial gov- 
ernment to that time ; he was intimate with 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 93 

Hooker and Haynes and the other leaders ; and 
comparison with his earlier and later papers 
points to the phraseology and diction of the 
constitution as his own. In the court of his- 
tory these are some of the witnesses in his 
behalf : 

" First lawyer who came to Connecticut, and one of 
the most gifted who ever lived in it." — Hollister : His- 
tory of Connecticut. 

" To him belongs the honor of first unfolding that rep- 
resentative system peculiar to our government. He 
probably drafted the constitution of Connecticut." — 
Tuttle : History of Windsor. 

" This document was drawn up by a member of the 
Windsor Church, Mr. Roger Ludlow, assented to by the 
magistrates." — Stiles : History of Ancient Windsor. 

" The document bears intrinsic evidence of a legal 
skill and phraseology which, when compared with Lud- 
low's code of 1650, seems to prove that, whosoever's 
advice he had, no other hand but his drew the first 
constitution of Connecticut." — Schenck : History of 
Fairfield. 

" Unsurpassed in his knowledge of law, and the rights 
of mankind." — Bancroft : History of the United States. 

" He rendered most essential services, was a principal 
in framing its original civil constitution. For jurispru- 
dence he seems to have been second to none who came 
into New England at that time." — Trumbull : History 
of Connecticut. 



94 ROGER LUDLOW 

" Whose hand soever may in detail have phrased and 
formulated the Fundamental Laws, and Haynes and 
Ludlow and other men there were who might have done 
it." — Walker's Thomas Hooker. 

" Constitution of 1639 mainly his work. The phrase- 
ology and spirit are his. The representative system of 
American republics was just unfolded by Ludlow — who 
probably drafted the constitution of Connecticut — and 
Hooker, Haynes, Wolcott, Steele, Sherman, and others." 
— Hollister : History of Connecticut. 

" Haynes and Ludlow shaped the infant state." — 
Elliott : History of JVew England. 

" This document, recognizing no authority save God's 
superior to that delegated by the people, was drawn up 
by a member of the Windsor Church, Mr. Roger Lud- 
low, assisted by the magistrates." — Hawes : Centennial 
Address. 

" Member constitutional convention of 1639. Proba- 
ably drafted that state document." — Cyclopaedia of Ameri- 
can Biography. 

" Father of legislation, drafted Connecticut constitu- 
tion, author of our representative government." — Mem. 
History of Hartford County. 

" The first instance of a written constitution adopted 
by the suffrages of the people and recognizing no allegi- 
ance to the king, prelate, or other earthly power. . . . 
No lover of democracy, no believer in the right of self- 
government by a people, can read it without a sense of 
worship, nor recall its authors but with reverence. . . . 
Its composition is credited to Roger Ludlow, a lawyer of 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 95 

scholarship, a democrat to the tips of his fingers, of 
whom Roger Wolcott said, ' He was a man inferior to 
none in good sense and skill in the law.' " — Robinson, 
H. C. : Constitutional History of Connecticut. 

" But the salient feature of Ludlow's career . 
was his large share in originating and putting into prac- 
tical operation the original laws of Connecticut. When, 
after the Pequot War, the General Court met to decide 
upon a frame of government, he was unanimously ap- 
pointed to make the draft. Of this great paper it is not 
too much to say briefly, that in its immediate application 
and far-reaching results, it ranks with the best that have 
been formulated by the profoundest statesmen." — Beers : 
" Roger Ludlow," Mag. American History. 

" He was the principal framer of the Constitution of 
1639." — Day's Notes. 

" On the 14th of January, 1638-9, the planters of 
Connecticut, assembling at a public meeting, proceeded 
to adopt a constitution, which was the first written con- 
stitution originating in the New World and the model for 
all succeeding ones. The authorship of it was generally 
attributed to Roger Ludlow." — Brinley's Prefatory 
Note, Laws of j6/j. 

" Among the men in this party who afterward became 
prominent was Roger Ludlow, who drafted the first con- 
stitution of Connecticut, which was practically the parent 
of all written constitutions, state and national." — Hay- 
den : Historical Address. 

Until there shall be found in the hidden 
records another key to the history of that 



96 ROGER LUDLOW 

colonial epoch, it will run in the minds of men 
that, while Haynes and Wyllys, Webster, Ma- 
son, Goodwin, Steele, and others may have 
shared in the deliberations of the planters, and 
have given voice to their convictions, Hooker 
inspired and Ludlow framed the Fundamental 
Orders, — men of equal honor in the profes- 
sions that ruled in the colonial state, the min- 
istry, and the law. 



CHAPTER XL 

The Code of 1650— Ludlow's " Body of Lawes "—Requested to Draft 
it by General Court— The Criminal Code— Massachusetts Body 
of Liberties— Differences— Code Four Years in Preparation— 
What it Was — Its Recognition in Legislation — Its Intrinsic 
Merits— Witnesses to its Authorship and Value— De Tocque- 
v iHe _ Trumbull — Day— Brinsley — Hamersley— Robinson — 
Schenck— Stiles. 

Whatever question may abide as to the 
honor due to any man in the making of the 
constitution of 1639 — and that Ludlow draft- 
ed it seems to be clearly shown — it is abun- 
dantly certified of record that he alone of all 
the eminent men in Connecticut seven years 
later was called upon by the General Court 
to frame a civil code, which ranks next to the 
constitution itself in the jurisprudence of the 
state, which to this day bears his name, and 
stands, in form or substance, in the present 
general laws. 

In determining the place and value of this 
code in history, it is always to be borne in 

97 



CjS ROGER LUDLOW 

mind that the constitution vested the supreme 
power of the State, executive, legislative, and 
judicial, in the General Court, " wch . . . 
shall have power to administer justice accord- 
ing to the lawes here established, and for 
want thereof according to the rule of the word 
of God " ; and again, and from the first, the 
colonists in New England claimed the benefit 
and protection of the common law. In some 
particulars, however, the English common law 
was not suited to their condition and circum- 
stances, and those particulars they omitted 
in its recognition and adoption. They also 
claimed the benefit of such statutes and or- 
ders as had been enacted in modification of 
this body of rules. 

At a session of the General Court, held 
April 9, 1646, when Edward Hopkins was 
Governor and John Haynes was Deputy Gov- 
ernor, it was ordered that 

" Mr. Ludlowe is requested to take some paynes in 
drawing forth a body of Lawes for the goverment of 
this Comonwelth, and p'sent the same to the next Gen- 
erall Court ; and if he can provide a man for his occa- 
sions while he is imployed in the said searvice, he shall 
be paid at the country chardge." 

Connecticut had already adopted a criminal 



THE -COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 99 

code taken from that of Massachusetts, with 
some additions, both founded on the Mosaic 
law and buttressed by scriptural texts. It was 
probably due to this fact that some writers 
have ventured to charge that the Code of 1650 
itself was also a compilation from Massachu- 
setts sources — a charge which the simplest 
comparison instantly disproves. 

The Massachusetts Body of Liberties, writ- 
ten by Nathaniel Ward, was adopted Decem- 
ber 10, 1 64 1, after amendment and revision by 
all the lawyers of the General Court. Its pro- 
visions were chiefly taken from Magna Charta 
and the English common law. It contained 
ninety-eight sections : the Connecticut code had 
but seventy-seven, and several of the Connect- 
icut laws were enacted prior to the establish- 
ment of the Massachusetts code. To be more 
specific, fourteen of the articles of Ludlow's 
code were taken from the Body of Liberties, 
some with slight verbal changes, and others 
with important additions ; but sixty-three of 
the articles were entirely new and distinct, and 
related to other matters, civil and criminal. 
Connecticut was provided with an adequate 
code of civil procedure, the machinery of civil 
government, without modification in its primary 



ioo ROGER LUDLOW 

code from Ludlow's hand. Massachusetts was 
not so fortunately provided, since within seven 
years from the adoption of the Body of Liber- 
ties the General Court found occasion to issue 
the Book of General Laws and Liberties, after 
a study of the English authorities : Coke 
upon Littleton, Coke up07i Magna Charta, 
Cokes Reports, Books of Entries, New Terms 
of the Law, and Dalton's Justice of the Peace. 

The capital laws both of Massachusetts and 
Connecticut were remarkable in that, while 
under the existing English law more than 
forty crimes and offences were punishable by 
death, under these more humane and enlight- 
ened laws death waited at the door of these 
colonial courts only on conviction of worship- 
ing false gods, witchcraft, blasphemy, murder, 
sodomy, crimes against nature, adultery, rape, 
kidnapping, perjury, and treason ; Connecti- 
cut having an additional provision for the 
punishment of rebellious children. And the 
records of the criminal trials of the time, with 
the testimony elicited by the magistrates, using 
the methods of a French judge of instruction, 
demonstrate the need of the extreme penalty 
for the commission of the gravest crimes. 

In the brief record of Ludlow's engagement 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 101 

by the General Court was the inditing of a 
great matter. Mark the scope of his com- 
mission ! not a compilation or revision of ex- 
isting laws, — many of them written by his own 
hand, at the General Court's request, — but 
the " drawing forth of a body of lawes for the 
goverment of this Comonwelth," the crea- 
tion of a code grounded in precedent and au- 
thority, and fitted to the necessities of the new 
civilization. 

Ludlow began at once this important work. 
With his other exacting public duties, four 
years were occupied in its completion ; and 
the code was finally adopted in May, 1650, 
and the only recognition of his great service 
is certified by a minute in the colonial records, 
by Colonial Secretary John Cullick, February 
5, 1 65 1 : "This court grants and orders that 
the secretary shall be allowed and paid the sum 
of six pounds, being in p r t of payment for his 
great paines in drawing out and transcribing 
the country orders, concluded and established 
in May last" (1650). No record exists of 
Ludlow's compensation for his great service, 
other than an entry that " it is the mynd of 
the court that he be considered for his 
paynes." 



io2 ROGER LUDLOW 

What the code was, what knowledge of the 
law it displayed, what acquaintance with pre- 
cedents and forms, with what foresight and 
skill it provided for the enforcement of order, 
the protection of person and property, the ad- 
ministration of justice in the courts, may be 
truly known only by a critical study of its 
articles, and of its influence and authority in 
the legislative and judicial history of the State 
for two hundred and sixty years. 

It covers over fifty printed pages of the first 
volume of the Connecticut colonial records. 
It was alphabetically arranged under seventy- 
seven titles ; thirty-seven being laws passed at 
previous sessions of the court, mostly drawn 
by Ludlow, since as deputy governor, modera- 
tor, or magistrate, he was present in court 
when twenty-one of these laws were passed, 
and he was specially requested to prepare the 
important orders relating to inquests, intestate 
estates, magistrates' power to inflict corporal 
punishment, records of land titles, and other 
fundamental matters, notably the institution 
of jury trials. 

Ludlow's classification was in general re- 
tained in all revisions of the statutes until 
1854, when fifty-eight of his seventy-seven ti- 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 103 

ties, somewhat modified, were still used ; and 
most of the articles of his code, in form or sub- 
stance, are t;o-day embodied in the general 
legislation of the State, — a wonderful demon- 
stration of the inherent vitality, the intrinsic 
merit of the laws themselves, and of the 
genius, ability, and learning of the man who 
was desired to draw them forth. 

But there are other witnesses than the letter 
or spirit of the law and its force in current leg- 
islation, to the character and value of this code 
of our forefathers and the reputation of its 
author. This is their cumulative evidence : 

" In the year 1646, Roger Ludlow, one of the most dis- 
tinguished men of his age, and entirely conversant with 
the proceedings of the General Court, was requested to 
compile a body of laws for the colony." — Committee on 
Revision Conn. Laws. 

" A systematic and comprehensive body of laws, pre- 
faced by a Bill of Rights, in which are contained several 
of the leading provisions of Magna Charta." — Committee 
on Revision Conn. Laws. 

"Amongst these documents — legislative — we shall no- 
tice as especially characteristic the code of laws promul- 
gated by the little State of Connecticut in 1650 . . . 
a body of political laws . . . which, though written 
two hundred years ago, is still ahead of the liberties of 
our age." — De Tocqueville : Democracy in America. 



104 ROGER LUDLOW 

" Roger Ludlow was one of the most able of the 
founders, and partly because he was an educated lawyer 
(perhaps the only one) has left an individual mark on 
legislation more easily traced than that of the others. 
The Code of 1650 was prepared by him and bears his 
name. He was evidently specially relied on by the 
General Court in matters pertaining to law, and on one 
occasion was by special order made moderator of the 
Particular Court, notwithstanding the governor or deputy 
governor might be present." — Hamersley : Connecticut : 
Origin of Constitution and Laws. 

" He appears to have been distinguished for his abilities 
and especially his knowledge of the law, and the rights 
of mankind. He rendered most essential services to this 
commonwealth ; was a principal in forming its original 
constitution, and the compiler of its first code. For 
jurisprudence he appears to have been second to none 
who came into New England at that time." — Trumbull : 
History of Connecticut. 

" This comprehensive code of laws, — and, for the 
seventeenth century, wonderfully liberal and advanced 
in freedom and wisdom, — was the work of Roger Lud- 
low, the ablest lawyer of the colony and probably of 
New England." — Robinson, H. C. : Hist. Address, 1889. 

" In the spring of 1650, the first code of laws, since 
known as Ludlow's code, was completed and entered 
upon the public records. This is the foundation of the 
written laws of Connecticut." — Day's Manuscript. 

" He was the first lawyer who came into Connecticut, 
and one of the greatest who has ever lived in the State. 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 105 

. . . He compiled a code of laws which many years 
afterwards was destined to rank him among the leading 
statesmen of the age in which he lived." — Schenck : 
History of Fairfield. 

" This (the code) is the foundation of the written laws 
of Connecticut." — Stiles: History of Ancient Windsor. 

" England's universities had thoroughly trained him in 
the manual of letters ; he was especially well drilled in 
jurisprudence, and brought to the chaotic colonies 
clearly defined notions of legislative polity. ... It 
was moreover by universal consent called ' Ludlowe's 
Code,' and by it the author gained the well-merited dis- 
tinction of ' The Father of Connecticut Jurisprudence.' " 
— Beers : " Roger Ludlow," Mag. American History. 

" The Connecticut code was compiled by Ludlow, who 
had one of the best legal minds in New England." — 
Elliott : History of New England. 



CHAPTER XII. 

Framer of the Constitution and the Code — Other Duties and Honors 
— Magistrate — Commissioner — Deputy Governor — At Windsor 
— Absence from Court — At Pequannocke — Purchase from the 
Indians — Fairfield — Reprimand — Plea of Justification — Court's 
Sanction — Advantage of the Purchase. 

Enough of Ludlow's honors has been told 
to place him in the foremost rank of the sturdy 
Englishmen who builded the colonial state. 
Men of less ability, less renown, are commemo- 
rated in bronze or marble likeness of tradition 
or resemblance, or in portraiture or tablet, and 
all pay them reverence for what they did or 
said in those days ; but nowhere save in ancient 
archives or records, or in casual historic men- 
tion, is duly honored the name of the man who 
wrote the Constitution and the Code of 1650, 
which in spirit or in letter have survived the 
shock of wars and the political and social revo- 
lutions of two hundred and sixty years. All 
this did Roger Ludlow do, and yet one chap- 
ter of his service, of his devotion to the land 

106 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 107 

of his adoption, resulting in misunderstand- 
ing, criticism, and voluntary exile, and the 
loss to Connecticut of one of the ablest 
men who ever lived in it, remains to be herein 
written. 

Set aside for a closer insight of Ludlow's 
career all that has been shown to his credit 
thus far, in England, Massachusetts, and Con- 
necticut, and still the old records are eloquent 
of other duties done, of honors won, which 
mark him as one of the great makers of history 
among the Puritan forefathers. 

As chief of the Massachusetts commission 
to govern Connecticut for a year, he organized 
that tribunal, presided at all its meetings, and 
framed its orders. On the formation of the 
government, in May, 1637, he was chosen a 
magistrate, and again in 1638. At the first 
general meeting of the freemen under the con- 
stitution of 1639, he was elected Deputy Gov- 
ernor, being the first to hold that office. In 
his absence in 1640, he was elected a magis- 
trate, — an office to which he was chosen every 
year until 1654, except in 1642 and 1648, when 
he again served as Deputy Governor. In 1648, 
1 65 1 , and 1 65 3 he was one of the commissioners 
to the United Colonies, dealing with the most 



108 ROGER LUDLOW 

important affairs of state, notably with the 
claims of Massachusetts to the territory of 
Springfield, of the Dutch to territory in Con- 
necticut, and the vital questions of the contro- 
versies in the impending war between the 
Dutch and English. And he was one of the 
representatives of Connecticut in the negotia- 
tions that led to the confederation of the colo- 
nies in 1643, and stood for the sovereignty of 
the people in framing the articles of that com- 
pact, — a reservation which saved its principle 
when the compact was broken up by the nulli- 
fication of Massachusetts. 

In addition to the burdens laid upon him in 
these executive and judicial offices, he served 
the state as commissioner to treat with Massa- 
chusetts as to the Pequot war, and the occu- 
pation of the Pequot lands ; to buy corn 
and beaver of the Indians ; to treat with con- 
testants as to the Fenwick patent ; to gather 
up remarkable passages of God's providence 
in the history of the plantations, for record ; as 
delegate to the ecclesiastical synod at Boston, 
with Hooker and Stone, and possibly on the 
very occasion when, to refresh the spirits of 
the disputants, the Massachusetts General 
Court passed this vote : " The court think it 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 109 

convenient that order be given to the auditor 
to send 12 gallons of sack and six gallons of 
white wine as a small testimony of the court's 
respect to the reverend assembly of elders at 
Cambridge"; to settle land disputes with 
Plymouth men at Windsor ; to answer with 
Governor Hopkins a letter from the Dutch 
Governor, Stuyvesant; to survey andset bounds 
to plantations ; to hold courts at Unquowa ; to 
serve as commissioner of military affairs in the 
border towns ; to confer with Governor Eaton 
and others about Indian war ; to arrange to 
supply soldiers with provisions in Indian cam- 
paign ; to promote the interests of Uncas 
against Sequassen's claims to sachemship ; to 
take lists of persons and estates at Norwalk ; 
to furnish powder and supplies to Captain Ma- 
son at Saybrook ; to control military affairs at 
Stratford ; to treat with New Haven authori- 
ties as to ships asked from Cromwell to aid in 
war against the Dutch ; to treat with the Longr 
Island Indians and friendly English there, and 
prepare frontier towns for the Dutch war, fol- 
lowing the disclosure to him of the conspiracy 
of Miantonomo to destroy the whites. Surely 
abundant additional proofs are these of Lud- 
low's pre-eminence, and of the confidence 



no ROGER LUDLOW 

reposed in him in important affairs and in 
emergencies. 

Ludlow made his home at Windsor, where 
he bought land of the Indians, from 1635 to 
1639. At a session of the General Court, held 
September 10, 1639, when he was Deputy 
Governor, he was fined five shillings for being 
absent. Some writers have suggested as a 
reason for his absence his chagrin and disap- 
pointment at the election of his former political 
opponent in Massachusetts — John Haynes — 
as Governor in that year ; but he made no pro- 
test then, "grew into no passion," and until 
the Governor's death in 1654, and his own 
return to Ireland, they served together as 
trusted counsellors and friends in the great 
matters of state. 

Nor was his absence due to any ambition for 
lordship, for personal control or ownership of 
great landed estates, after the English fashion, 
as his own moderate acquisitions clearly de- 
monstrate. Nor was it due, as some have sur- 
mised, to a desire to gain an independent field 
for the display of his talents or ambitions. On 
the contrary, his removal from Windsor to 
Fairfield in 1639, where he made his home and 
served the state for fifteen years, was the 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. hi 

result of his sagacity and wisdom in securing 
favorable and ample territory for the increas- 
ing number of colonists, and that, too, before it 
was appropriated by the Dutch or the rival 
colony of New Haven ; and it is simply an- 
other fact to the credit of this far-seeing man 
in promoting the development of the three 
original towns. 

Early in 1639 tne General Court granted a 
commission to Ludlow to begin a plantation at 
Pequannocke. He was on that errand, with a 
few others from Windsor, afterwards joined by 
immigrants from Watertown and Concord, 
when the fine was imposed. He bought a 
large tract . of land from the Pequannocke 
sachems, — afterwards greatly enlarged by other 
purchases to the westward, — and recalling the 
attractive region beyond (Uncoa), which he 
had personally seen on the second Pequot ex- 
pedition, he also " set down " there, having 
purchased the territory embraced in the pres- 
ent town of Fairfield, to which he gave its 
name. 

On his return to Hartford, at a General 
Court session, October 10, 1639, he was taken 
to task for exceeding his commission. He 
made a tactful and effectual explanation and 



ii2 ROGER LUDLOW 

plea in justification of his act. It is thus 
reported : 

" Att his coming downe to Quinnipiocke the hand of 
the Lord was uppon him in taking away some of his cat- 
tle, wch prevented him in some of his purposes there for 
selling some of them : afterwards, att his coming to Pe- 
quannocke, he found cause to alter his former thoughts 
of wintering his cattle there, and understanding that the 
beginnings of a Plantacon beyond that was not caryed on 
according to the agreement made with t,hose who were 
interessed in ordering the same, and that by some things 
wch appeared to him, his apprehensions were that some 
others intended to take up the sayd place who had not 
acquainted this Court with their purposes therein, wch 
might be preiudiciall to this Comonwelth, and knowing 
himselfe to be one of those to whom the disposel of that 
Plantacon was comitted, he adventured to drive his Cat- 
tle thither, make provision for them there, and to sette 
out himselfe and some others house lotts to build on 
there, and submitts himselfe to the Court to judge 
whether he hath transgressed the Comission or not." 

A reprimand was given to Ludlow chiefly 
because he had not notified the General Court 
of his intention in advance ; and Governor 
Haynes and Thomas Wells were appointed to 
visit the country (Fairfield), investigate what 
Ludlow had done, and report to the court. 
This was done ; and they reported, that, " upon 
due consideration of the same, they had, 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 113 

thought fit, upon Mr. Ludlow's assenting to 
the terms propounded by them, to confirm the 
same." And thus a fair domain was won for 
the Connecticut colony by peaceful measures, 
and held against the intrigues of the Dutch 
and the rival claims of New Haven, — a posi- 
tion of great strategic advantage and strength 
to the parent government in the later con- 
troversies of territorial ownership and occupa- 
tion. Here again was he the man who held 
the post of honor, as he did in the palisado at 
Windsor in the stress of the Pequot war in 

1637. 
s 



CHAPTER XIII. 

Dutch Claims in Connecticut — Confederation — Johnston's Opinion 
— Contention 1635-1664 — Indian Allies — Diplomacy — Commis- 
sioners' Charges — Stuyvesant's Denial — Refusal of Massachu- 
setts — Nullification — Historical Incidents — Rhode Island — 
Underhill — Petition to Cromwell — Ships and Troops — Peace 
Declaration. 

The Dutch claimed the territory of Con- 
necticut through the primal rights of discov- 
ery, of conquest or purchase, and occupation, 
— rights that underlie all civilization, by the 
strong hand ; — and this fact is to be considered, 
howsoever one may criticise their blunt di- 
plomacy, their disingenuousness, or their stub- 
bornness in the support of their demands. They 
were adventurers for trade, and were ready to 
negotiate or manoeuvre, bluster, or threaten, 
or fight for its advantages by the same methods 
which brought them profit along the Hudson 
and Mohawk, including the hazardous ex- 
change of muskets and ammunition and rum 
with the Indians for beaver and other furs, 

114 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 115 

with shrewd and cunning appeals on occasion 
to their passions of cupidity and revenge. 

What, in brief, are the facts as to the warfare 
along the western border in those crucial days ? 
What were its causes, its incidents, its results ? 
Who stood fast against Dutch intrigue and 
Indian craftiness, in the interests of the colon- 
ists, and finally sacrificed himself that his heri- 
tage — their heritage — should endure ? 

The confederation of the colonies in 1643, — 
Connecticut, Massachusetts (with a greater 
population than the other colonies together), 
New Haven, and Plymouth, — was in chief due 
to a fear of the Dutch and the Indians : al- 
though Johnston, in his History of Connecti- 
cut, attributes it to a single cause : 

" The leading reason for the formation of 
the union was probably the inability of the 
home government, during the confusion of 
the civil war, to afford protection to the New 
Englanders against the claims of the Dutch 
colony of New Netherlands." 

That the motives of the league were com- 
posite is shown in the preamble to its articles : 

" . . . whereas we live encompassed with people 
of severall Nations and strange languages which here- 
after may prove injurious to us and our posterity " ; 



u6 ROGER LUDLOW 

" and forasmuch as the Natives have formerly com- 
mitted sundry insolencies and outrages upon severall 
Plantations of the English, and have of late combined 
themselves against us." 

From the first clash between the English 
and Dutch on the Connecticut, in 1635, to the 
surrender of New Amsterdam to the English 
fleet in 1664, through the directorships of 
Minuit, van Twiler, Kieft, and Stuyvesant, 
there ran the red current of bitter racial con- 
troversy, chicanery, plot and counterplot, con- 
spiracy, and savage warfare. Across some 
imaginary territorial line the tides of battle 
came and went, bearing with them the ghastly 
wreckage of arson, massacre, and pillage. 

That the Dutch were ready at all times, 
and especially when the controversy ripened 
to the actual declaration of war, to call to their 
aid the tribes of savages, admits of no ques- 
tion. Witness the instructions of the United 
Provinces to their director-general, Stuyvesant, 
in the war year that saw the naval battles of 
Blake and Von Tromp, in 1652 : 

" If it happen, which we will not yet sup- 
pose, that those New Englanders did incline to 
take a part in these broils, and injure our good 
inhabitants, then we should advise your honor 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 117 

to engage the Indians in your cause, who, we 
are informed, are not partial to the English." 

Every reason, then, had the men of the 
united colonies, and especially the settlers in 
the frontier towns, where the first onset would 
be made, to believe the statement of Uncas to 
Governor Haynes, that the Dutch governor 
was inciting the Narragansetts to cut off the 
English ; confirmed, as it was, by the disclos- 
ures of other friendly sachems at Stratford, 
and to Ludlow in person at Fairfield in March, 

1653. 

The commissioners of the united colonies 

met at Boston in April, 1653, to consider the 
situation. Then began the long series of in- 
quiries, of commissions, of diplomatic denials 
and defiances which read in the light of truth 
make one of the interesting chapters in our 
colonial history. 

The New Englanders made up their minds 
to provide for emergencies, and negotiate 
afterwards ; and so they voted that five hundred 
men should take the field "if God called the 
colonies to make war against the Dutch." 
They had no more doubt about their relations 
to Providence and the righteousness of their 
cause than Ethan Allen had in the Bennington 



n8 ROGER LUDLOW 

meeting-house, when the minister in a prayer 
of great detail was giving thanks to the Al- 
mighty for the capture of Ticonderoga, and 
Allen stood up in the congregation and ex- 
claimed, " Please mention to the Lord about 
my being there " ; and so were they doubly 
armed to take up the controversies with the 
doughty Dutch director-general. 

At first the commissioners charged the In- 
dian sachems with the conspiracy ; they denied 
it ; and the commissioners drew up a long 
manifesto of grievances and complaints, and 
appointed delegates to visit Manhattan and 
demand satisfaction. Stuyvesant received the 
visitors courteously, denied any share in the 
plot to kill the English, and the charges in 
detail, solemnly avowing : " This only we 
know, that what your worships lay unto our 
charge are false reports and forged informa- 
tion." The delegates refused all terms of com- 
promise, charged Stuyvesant with evasion and 
duplicity, and left " the enemy's country " in the 
night. Arbitration, even with Englishmen 
chosen to represent the Dutch interests, came 
to naught ; the delegates divided on their re- 
port ; a conference proved futile, as did the 
director-general's visit at Hartford ; and the 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 119 

colonists made ready for that providential call 
to arms. 

From the outset Massachusetts had de- 
murred to the action of the colonial commis- 
sioners, through her representatives in that 
tribunal, on the ground that at present she 
could see no occasion for war ; that the Dutch 
had made a suitable explanation, and she 
then refused to join in the campaign, and so 
wrote across the articles of confederation her 
decree of nullification. And from that day 
until the dissolution of the confederation in 
1684, each colony developed on independent 
lines. 

The salient features in the history of that 
time are these : In July, 1653, New Haven and 
Connecticut, pursuant to the majority vote of 
the colonial commissioners, called on Massa- 
chusetts for her quota of the five hundred men, 
or to allow the recruiting of from two to four 
hundred men from that colony. Governor 
Endicott declined to honor the call. New 
Haven and Connecticut then sent agents to 
England to petition Cromwell to send over 
some troops and ships to aid them in fighting 
the Dutch, and to command Massachusetts to 
assist in the war. 



120 ROGER LUDLOW 

Rhode Island took a hand in the imbroglio, 
and fitted out a marauding expedition under 
the command of the soldier-adventurer, John 
Underhill, whom Lowell describes as "a kind 
of cross between Dugald Dalgetty and Ancient 
Pistol," who took the defenceless House of 
Good Hope at Hartford, nailed his flamboy- 
ant proclamation on its doors, and " Sold it 
first to Ralph Earle of Rhode Island for ,£20, 
and again to Gibbons and Lord," giving a 
deed to both parties ; and the General Court 
passed a formal act of sequestration of this 
Dutch possession, in April, 1654. 

The colonial committee found public senti- 
ment in England bitter against the Dutch in 
New Netherland ; and Cromwell, on their 
petition, sent four ships, the Raven, the 
Church, the Argentine, and the Hope, with a 
few troops, to aid the colonists in reducing 
Manhattan and all other Dutch places ; and 
June 1, 1654, the fleet was at anchor at Bos- 
ton, to be equipped for the expedition ; and 
June 23d it was victualled for about 900 foot 
and one troop of horse, — 300 recruiting from 
Massachusetts, under permission from the Gen- 
eral Court to enlist volunteers, 200 from Con- 
necticut, 133 from New Haven, and 200 from 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 121 

the fleet, — and was on the eve of sailing, when 
the news of the peace between England and 
Holland was received. The English on Long 
Island were ready to join in the onset ; the 
English at Manhattan were active in their 
efforts to aid their brethern ; and the Dutch 
themselves were alienated by the oppression 
and misrule of Stuyvesant and his predeces- 
sors, and would not fight under his orders. 
Naturally there was a day of thanksgiving at 
New Amsterdam when the welcome tidings of 
peace came. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

Virginia Massacre — Delaware Colonists — Mohawks — French in Can- 
ada — Six Nations — French Embassy to New England — Treach- 
ery and Intrigue — Rivalry of Indian Sachems — Threats, Plots, 
and Murders — Apprehension in Border Towns — Alarm of the 
Colonists — War Preparations — Rebellion at Stamford — Con- 
necticut and New Haven Refuse Assistance — Fairfield Raises 
Troops — Ludlow Chosen Commander — Reasons for his Action 
— Notice to Authorities — Their Disapproval. 

The suspicions of the English, and their be- 
lief in the Dutch and Indian conspiracy, were 
intensified by the memories of the massacre of 
the Virginia colonists by old Opecancanough 
and his warriors a few years before — memories 
kept alive by the stories of the " divers godly 
disposed persons " who then removed into 
New England and settled in the Connecticut 
border towns. And the Dutch had arrested 
and imprisoned and driven out the colonists 
who had attempted to settle at the Delaware, 
to the great chagrin and loss of the capitalists 
who had adventured there. 

To the westward between the lakes and the 

122 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 123 

Hudson, and to the border where the dreaded 
Mohawks made their forays and exacted trib- 
ute from the tribes they had subdued, there 
was a field of conflict, — war to-day and truce 
to-morrow, as red men and white struggled for 
the mastery. 

To the northward, men of another race and 
religion had battled for gain and conquest, — 
devotees of mistaken modes of colonization. 
Champlain, Montmagny, Maisonneuve, gover- 
nors, commandants, and superiors, had spent 
weary years of warfare with the native tribes. 
They were led and inspired by the courage 
and heroism of the Jesuits, who carried the 
message of the Master alike to Huron and Ir- 
oquois. Le Jeune, Brebeuf, Chabanel, Jonges, 
Noue, Bressani, were not dismayed by torture 
or starvation, by the horrors of cannibalism, 
or the maniac deviltries of the Ononhara or 
Dream Feast. Men at arms, men of affairs, 
men and women reared in the atmosphere of 
courts and bred to their luxuries, had laid 
down their lives to hold the vast domain of 
the north for the honor of France. Strange 
tales of the devotion and sacrifice of these 
Jesuit fathers, of the sufferings of gentle men 
and women, of stratagem, of ambuscade, of 



124 ROGER LUDLOW 

horrid rites, of massacre, were told in the colo- 
nial homes of New England, all intensifying 
the unrest and alarm that waited on every ru- 
mor from the lips of voyageur, scout, trapper, 
or Indian runner. 

The warriors of the Six Nations had driven 
the French into the towns and outposts, and 
spread desolation and terror in the valley of 
the St. Lawrence and along the lakes ; and in 
such dire distress were these " pioneers of 
France in the new world," that they sent the 
accomplished Druillets and Godfroy to pray 
aid of the heretic New Englanders in their be- 
half, and that of the Christianized Indians of 
Acadia, against the Mohawks and warriors of 
the Six Nations. Their plea was adroit and 
ingenious ; and the colonial commissioners, not 
to be outdone in diplomatic courtesy, assured 
the Frenchmen of their readiness to do all of- 
fices of righteousness, peace, and good neigh- 
borhood ; but they must await a more favorable 
time for negotiations. It was an occasion for 
diplomacy, and few state papers of that day 
are of greater diplomatic interest than the final 
answer of the commissioners to the represen- 
tatives from Governor D'Aillebout of Canada, 
who had labored for years, by correspondence 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 125 

and otherwise, to bring about an alliance with 
New England. But Frenchman and Puritan 
could not make treaties in the presence of the 
general sentiment expressed in the Massachu- 
setts statute : " No Jesuit or ecclesiastical per- 
son ordained by the authority of the Pope shall 
henceforth come within our jurisdiction." 

Dutch hatred, Indian treachery, French in- 
trigue, kindled their bale-fires around the co- 
lonial horizon, and through their darkling 
clouds were seen grim portents of savage war- 
fare to appall the stoutest hearts in the ham- 
lets and solitary homes in the wilderness ; and 
these fears were intensified in the tribal and 
racial rivalries and hostilities of the natives 
within the borders, — not so much of the tribes 
conquered by the Mohawks, and of whom 
Ludlow and his friends purchased lands at 
Fairfield and vicinity, as primarily in the am- 
bition of Miantonomo and Uncas, the claims 
to sovereignty of Narragansett and Mohegan, 
the machinations of Ninigret, and the enmity 
of the Pequot remnant toward all their con- 
querors. To Miantonomo's death, in 1643, 
the war councils were aflame ; and only the 
strong hand of English power held the bal- 
ance of safety, amid conspiracies and alliances 



i 2 6 ROGER LUDLOW 

that were a constant menace to the peace of 
all New England. 

After the death of the Narragansett chief, 
the serious Indian troubles were centred in 
the towns in the southwestern part of the 
State, settled by Ludlow and the pioneers who 
followed him from Windsor, Concord, and 
other places. 

What were the special causes of apprehen- 
sion, apart from the general ones already 
noted ? They are written here and there in 
the annals of conspiracies and atrocities, and 
clearly tell why all the fighting men flew to 
arms, and, impatient of the slow deliberation 
of their distant inland neighbors, chose a com- 
mander of their own in the presence of great- 
est perils. 

In the summer and fall of 1643, the In- 
dians killed over forty of the Dutch ; mur- 
dered Anne Hutchinson, of Antinomian fame, 
and her family, eighteen persons in all, at 
Stratford ; and drove in the settlers west of 
Stamford. Strict watch was kept in every 
plantation, and every man capable of bearing 
arms in western Connecticut was obliged, on 
the Lord's Day, to go armed to the places of 
worship. 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 127 

In the spring of 1644, the Indians killed a 
man between Fairfield and Stamford. They 
promised to deliver the murderer to Ludlow 
at Fairfield, but let him go in sight of the 
town. The English, in retaliation, seized and 
put in prison some sachems and other natives. 
The Indians arose en masse and terrified Fair- 
field and Stamford ; and the prisoners were 
released. A month later an Indian assaulted, 
with a hammer, a woman in the town street of 
Stamford, making her insane, and robbed the 
house. Natives of the home tribes went on 
the war-path, fired guns around the planta- 
tions, and neglected their corn-planting. No 
travel by land was safe ; close watch and 
strong guard were kept night and day. And 
the border towns appealed to Connecticut and 
New Haven for aid in their distress. 

Trade with the Indians in guns and swords 
and any warlike instruments was forbidden, 
under a fine of the value of the article sold. 
Sales to the French and Dutch were also 
prohibited. 

In 1646, a plot to kill several of the princi- 
pal people of Hartford was unmasked. Se- 
quassen hired Watolisbrough to assassinate 
Hopkins, Haynes, and Whiting. He confessed 



128 ROGER LUDLOW 

the scheme at Hartford. The commissioners 
demanded the surrender of Sequassen and 
other conspirators. The Indians defied them, 
primed and cocked their pieces, and derided 
the officers and troops sent to arrest the 
leaders. They burned the tar and turpentine 
stored at Windsor, and set all the country 
about Milford on fire, to destroy the town. 

The Narragansetts and Nehanticks violated 
their agreement with the whites, and besought 
the Mohawks to attack them. 

Ninigret (their chief) said he would pile the 
English cattle in heaps, and kill every Eng- 
lishman who should step out at his door, and 
these tribes were more insolent in western Con- 
necticut than ever, in 1648. They invited the 
Pocomtucks and Mohawks to join them in a 
war against Uncas and the Mohegans. United 
they could put eight hundred warriors in the 
field ; and they threatened to march through 
the colony on the war-path. 

In the same year, John Whitmore, repre- 
sentative of Stamford in the General Court, 
was slain while driving his cattle home from 
the fields. Connecticut and New Haven at 
last declared war against the Indians at Stam- 
ford and vicinity, on account of the Whitmore 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 129 

murder and other outrages. They became 
alarmed, and ceased their depredations for a 
time. 

In 1653, after this series of outbreaks, the 
colonists had no doubt of the Dutch and In- 
dian conspiracy against them, and prepared 
for war. A general anxiety prevailed, and 
special precautions were taken against an at- 
tack, which they had learned from friendly 
Indians was fixed for the day of public elec- 
tions, when the freemen would be from home. 
Ploughing, sowing, and planting were delayed, 
and the settlers were exhausted by constant 
watching, and put to great outlays for the 
public safety. 

The fear was greatest in the frontier towns. 
Men were sent to Stamford to aid in its de- 
fence. A frigate patrolled the Sound, to 
defend the coast against the Dutch and incur- 
sions from Long Island by Ninigret and his 
warriors. The settlers at Stamford rebelled 
against the slow prosecution of the war, set up 
for the home government against the colonies, 
raised troops, and asked permission to recruit in 
other towns. Goodyear and Newman, from 
New Haven, tried to quiet them by reading 
an order of a committee of Parliament directing 



no ROGER LUDLOW 

them to obey the colonial authorities. They 
insisted that New Haven should pay a part of 
their expenses in fortifications, and provide 
a guard there during the winter. Some arrests 
were made for attempting an insurrection. 

Fairfield took more deliberate action, and 
resolved to prosecute the war despite the pro- 
voking delays of the authorities at Connecticut 
and New Haven. The people there came near 
to revolution in their alarm and impatience in 
raising volunteers and arming for an expedi- 
tion against the Dutch and defence against 
the Indians. They appointed Roger Ludlow 
commander-in-chief of their forces. In what 
he conceived to be his duty, and in his dis- 
pleasure that the colonies did not follow the 
declaration of their own commissioners in 
the presence of the impending dangers, he 
accepted this command without the official 
sanction or commission of the authorities, but 
honestly and honorably to meet a responsi- 
bility imposed by his neighbors and friends, 
and not without hope and assurance that, as 
he was once charged with the supervision of 
military affairs on the border by the General 
Court, the end would justify the means. 

He had good reasons for his confidence. 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 131 

He was then a colonial commissioner. He 
had been charged with the oversight of mili- 
tary affairs at Fairfield and vicinity. He was 
at Boston, at an extra commissioners' session, 
March 17 and April 19, 1653, and urged that 
men and arms should be sent to protect Fair- 
field and the adjacent towns on the Sound. 
He and Captain John Cullick, as commis- 
sioners, were " invested with full power to agi- 
tate such occasions as concern the United 
colonies, for Connecticut, according to their 
former commission." Ludlow was also of the 
special committee to persuade Massachusetts 
to join in the expedition against the Dutch. 
When she refused, the commissioners sent 
warning to each colony to prepare for war. 
He also acted with Governor Haynes, as a 
committee, in arranging for the campaign with 
Governor Eaton of New Haven. 

The matter culminated thus : Thomas Bax- 
ter, a freebooter from Rhode Island, with a 
commission from that colony, " under the 
Commonwealth of England," seized a Dutch 
vessel, and brought her into Black Rock har- 
bor, at Fairfield. The Dutch sent to Con- 
necticut two men-of-war, with one hundred 
men, which lay in the roadstead, off Fairfield. 



i 3 2 ROGER LUDLOW 

There was great excitement and alarm. At 
a town meeting it was voted to raise troops 
for defence and to make war on the Dutch. 
Then Ludlow was made commander and ac- 
cepted, as the town might be attacked at any 
moment, and began to drill his men and pre- 
pare for the attack. He immediately wrote 
Governor Eaton of his appointment and ac- 
tion ; and his letter was read to the General 
Court at New Haven, November 22, 1653. 
But the magistrates at New Haven, hitherto 
foremost in their advocacy of war against the 
Dutch, and who had charged Massachusetts 
with a violation of the Confederation articles 
because of its refusal to join in this war, made 
only this answer to Ludlow's notice and the 
appeal of their neighbors in their distress. 
The Governor (Eaton) acquainted the Court 
with a letter he had received 

" from Mr Ludlow, informing of a meeting they have 
had at Fairfield at w c h they have concluded to goe 
against the Duch, and have chosen him for their chiefe, 
and he hath accepted it ; all w c h wrightings were read to 
the court, after w c h the court considered whether they 
were called at this time to send forth men against the 
Duch, and after much debate and consultation . . . 
the court by vote declared that . . . they see not 
themselves called to vote for a present warr." 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 133 

In the presence of the declaration of war by 
the council of which he had been a member ; 
of the order of Parliament that the Dutch 
should be treated as the declared enemies of 
the Commonwealth of England ; of the gen- 
eral belief that the subjugation of the New 
Netherlands was the only way to lasting safety 
and peace, who will now question that Roger 
Ludlow undertook the performance of a plain 
duty, and was justified in his action ? New 
Haven disliked Ludlow, and the criticism and 
indifference expressed in its treatment of his 
letter were due to his taking up and settle- 
ment of Fairfield — which geographically be- 
longed to that colony — as one of the towns 
of its rival, Connecticut ; to his liberal views 
in civil and religious matters, as set forth in 
the Fundamental Orders and the Code ; to 
its fear that he might found another colony 
for democratic government in the adjacent 
territory when wrested from the Dutch ; and 
to the vigorous protests he had made from 
time to time, and his home thrusts at men and 
their measures, in the hot debates between 
the leaders and makers of public opinion in 
the rival colonies. 



CHAPTER XV. 

Witchcraft — Ancestors' Convictions — English Law — Persecution — 
King James — More — Fuller — Granvil — Massachusetts — Mather 
— Witchcraft Laws — Capital Crime — Goodman — Knapp — Bas- 
sett — Accusation of Ludlow — Staples v. Ludlow — The Charges 
— The Defence — Fines — Subsequent Indictment of Plaintiff's 
Wife for Familiarity with Satan. 

The forefathers believed in witchcraft,— en- 
tering into compacts with devils. They set it 
down in their criminal codes as a capital 
offence. They found abundant authority in 
the English law and precedents. The statutes 
of Henry VIII. and James I. made Conjura- 
tions, Enchantment, and Witchcraft punisha- 
ble by death ; and they were not repealed 
until 1 736. Many fell victims to the merciless 
execution of these laws, the persecution being 
kept aflame by such theological insanities as 
King James's Doctrine of Devils, More's Anti- 
dote to Atheism, Fuller's Holy and Profane 
State, and Granvil's Sadducismus Triumphatus. 
Fortunately the mania did not take firm hold 

134 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 135 

in the colonies until about 1650, and then only 
in sporadic cases, when "the Devil starteth 
himself up in the pulpit, like a meikle black 
man, and calling the row [roll], every one an- 
swered, ' Here.' ' Massachusetts had a unique 
record of convictions and punishments. Men, 
women, and children of tender years were done 
to death on Gallows Hill, terrified into confes- 
sion, but protesting their innocence with un- 
shaken constancy. Cotton Mather fed the 
fires with his malevolent delusions, writing in 
his ministerial inebriety of " prodigious pro- 
cessions of devils," in the time of Governor 
Phips. It was he who calmly looked on when 
Burroughs was hung, salved the conscience he 
had by composing such twaddle as the " Late 
Memorable Providences Relating to Witch- 
crafts and Possessions," and still with unwit- 
ting irony confessing to himself, in his diary, 
that he " had temptations to atheism, and to the 
abandonment of all religion as a mere delusion." 

The General Court of Connecticut estab- 
lished this capital law : 

" 2. If any man or woman be a witch (that 
is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit), 
they shall be put to death. Ex. 22 : 18, Lev. 
20 : 27, Deut. 18 : 10, 11." 



136 ROGER LUDLOW 

And New Haven colony, in fewer words, 
but on the same Scriptural authority, provided 
in its capital laws : 

" If any person be a witch, he or she shall 
be put to death according to Ex. 22 : 18, Lev. 
20 : 27, Deut. 18 : 10, 1 1." 

While the witchcraft fever raged in Massa- 
chusetts, the colonists of New Haven and 
Connecticut were vigilant to suppress any 
outbreak in their own jurisdiction, by heroic 
remedies ; and the disease seemed quite as 
virulent on the magisterial bench as in the 
humble homes of the few victims of its un- 
righteous judgments. 

Mistress Goodman was first suspected and 
accused at New Haven, in August, 1653 ; was 
cautioned that " the court wisheth her to looke 
to her carriage hereafter . . . keepe her 
place, and medle with her owne business " ; 
was later imprisoned, and finally released on 
giving security for her good behavior. Accu- 
sations and indictments appear in the records 
for many years, with water ordeals, and various 
tests of innocence, with death sentences in one 
or two cases, afterward commuted ; but the 
executions of Goodwife Knapp at Fairfield, 
and Goodwife Bassett at Stratford, gave pause 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 137 

to magistrates in imposing the death penalty, 
and last of all reached the clergy, and tem- 
pered or silenced their denunciations of this 
crime, born of delusion and nurtured by bigotry 
run rampant. 

Enough has been written here of this story 
of dishonor to demonstrate that an accusation 
of witchcraft was a serious matter. It was an 
easy thing to make, and unfortunately easy to 
prove upon evidence, hearsay and circumstan- 
tial, which no court would hear for a moment 
under the modern rules of the admission of ev- 
idence. As it was easy to bring such a grave 
accusation through malice, carelessness, or love 
of gossip, so was it much easier to charge one 
with having made such an accusation out of 
spite or revenge or other form of deviltry, and 
make him liable in a civil suit for slander, for 
oral defamation of character. If the person 
accused was responsible in estate for the dam- 
ages to be adjudged, the imagination and zeal 
and triumph of the accuser seem to have been 
materially enhanced. There was little to dis- 
courage chronic litigants, since aside from 
" just damages to the party wronged " — usually 
adjudged nominal, — the maximum fine for a 
vexatious suit was forty shillings. 



i 3 8 ROGER LUDLOW 

In the last days of his nineteen years of ser- 
vice to Connecticut, Ludlow was made a vic- 
tim of one of these accusations, in a suit 
entitled 

" Thomas Staples of Fairfield, plant., 
Mr. Rogger Ludlow, late of Fairfield, defendt," 

tried before the Court at New Haven, May 29 
and October 18, 1654. 

The report of this trial, with the testimony 
of witnesses in some of its questionable de- 
tails, covers fourteen pages of vol. i. of the 
New Haven colonial records. 

There were three charges in the complaint : 

1. That Ludlow had said that Staples s wife 
had laid herself under new suspicion of be- 
ing a witch. 

2. That Knapp's wife ( hanged for witchcraft ) 
had told him that Goodwife Staples was a 
witch. 

3. That Ludlow had slandered her by saying 
she made a trade of lying. 

In his absence, Ludlow's attorney and friend, 
Ensign Bryan, made a defence, in which the 
testimony of seventeen witnesses was given, 
showing to the satisfaction of any impartial 
tribunal of present-day experience, that what 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 139 

Ludlow said of Goodwife Staples being a 
witch was true upon her own statements to 
her friends and neighbors, and that he said he 
thought them not true ; but the learned judges 
found against him, and ordered him to pay to 
Staples, " by way of fine for reparation of his 
wiue's name," on the first charge, " tenn 
pounds, and for his trouble and charge in fol- 
lowing the suit, five pounds more." 

The second charge was dropped ; but in the 
following October the Court fined Ludlow — 
whose attorney made no defence — ten pounds 
more, to be paid to Staples " toward ye re- 
pairing his wiue's name," on Ludlow's alleged 
charge that she " had gone on in a tract of 
lying." As we find a Mrs. Staples under indict- 
ment at Fairfield, several years later, for "fa- 
miliarity with Satan," Thomas's damages would 
not seem to have gone far toward " repairing 
his wife's name." Whether she escaped, after 
being bound hand and foot and put into the 
water, by floating, as Mercy Disborough and 
Elizabeth Clawson did, who were also indicted 
for like diabolism, is not told in the history of 
the time. There can be no doubt that this 
suit for slander against Ludlow for some hasty 
and indiscreet words, spoken to some friends 



i 4 o ROGER LUDLOW 

"in a confidential way," as one of them testi- 
fied, and on a burning topic of the hour, falling 
in the midst of bitter disappointment and 
anxieties about public affairs, counted with 
other things in his final resolution to leave the 
country. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

Ludlow's Departure from Connecticut — Its Causes — Day's State- 
ment — Arrival in England — Return to Ireland — Settlement at 
Dublin — Services There — Cromwell's Preference — Magistrate — 
Commissioner of Forfeited Estates — His Associates — Pepys — 
Corbett — Cooke — Reading — Allen — Carterett — Order of Lord 
Deputy and Council — Master in Chancery — Last Record of 
Service, December 16, 1659 — Death of his Wife — Resident of 
St. Michan's Parish in 1664, at Age of 74 — Estimate of his 
Qualities and Achievements — Brinley's Inscription — The State 
— Its Capitol — Its Honor to Hooker, Davenport, Trumbull, 
Sherman — Its Duty to Ludlow — Its Opportunity. 

At threescore and four years of age, and 
after twenty-four years of distinguished service 
in New England, Ludlow carried out his de- 
claration to the Massachusetts General Court, 
of twenty-two years before, to return into Eng- 
land. The causes of his removal are not all 
known or understood, and never may be ; but 
it is certain that they culminated in the refusal, 
both of the Connecticut and the New Haven 
colony, to come to his support in the presence 
of a war which threatened the destruction of 

141 



i 4 2 ROGER LUDLOW 

Fairfield, and the criticism which followed his 
election by its people as a commander of the 
militia there, an office which he thought it was 
his right and duty to assume in the emer- 
gency, under authority in military matters pre- 
viously granted him by the General Court of 
Connecticut, and a post of honor which pa- 
triotism and loyalty to his friends and towns- 
men compelled him to accept. Little did he 
dream, as he drilled his handful of men on the 
village green that they might prosecute what 
all believed to be a righteous war in defence of 
their families and homes, that he was inviting 
the condemnation of his brethren and long- 
time associates in Court and Council, and 
charges of insurrection at their hands. 

Day, in his note on Ludlow, assigns these 
reasons for his departure : 

" The reasons which led to this sudden but voluntary 
exile are as follows : In that year the colony was alarmed 
by fears of Dutch and Indian hostilities ; and Stamford 
and Fairfield, then frontier towns, were thrown into an 
agony of apprehension. Entreating the New Haven 
colony for troops and assistance, they were refused ; and 
losing all patience, they resolved to raise troops inde- 
pendently of the colony, and to defend their own borders, 
and carry on the war themselves. Roger Ludlow was 
appointed commander-in-chief. In all this there seems 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 143 

to have been no thought of sedition, but only the impul- 
sive action of a town, who, foreseeing their own immi- 
nent peril, and hopeless of receiving the needed aid from 
a source whence they had a right to expect it, resolved 
to arm in their own defence. The government of Con- 
necticut, however, did not view it in that light, but treat- 
ing it as a matter of insubordination, if not of open 
revolt, proceeded to deal with the principal movers in 
the affair as ' fomenters of insurrection.' 

" Ludlow, although not openly dealt with, had been 
foremost among those who were for prosecuting the war 
against the Dutch. He had also seriously compromised 
himself by his hasty and unadvised acceptance of the 
command of the Fairfield forces, without legal appoint- 
ment. He felt that he had, without any moral guilt, in- 
curred the displeasure of the colony, and that unless he 
should make some humiliating concessions, his behavior 
would not be likely to escape public censure. It was 
quite evident that his popularity had reached the meri- 
dian. Proud and sensitive to a high degree, he brooded 
over the change that had taken place in his prospects, 
as well for promotion as for usefulness, . . . and at 
last came to the conclusion, but not without many keen re- 
grets, to leave the colony where he held so conspicuous 
a place for nineteen years." 

Count all these factors in his leave-takino; as 
verities, and add to them those that tradition 
or inference may warrant : that he felt the 
scandal from the Staples suit ; that he had lost 
in some degree his prestige at home, in public 



144 ROGER LUDLOW 

and private estimation ; that he longed to re- 
sume relations with his kindred and friends in 
England, to return to the environment of his 
earlier life, to win new honors in the field of 
his former activities ; and there still remains 
one more potent than all others, and hitherto 
not made known, to wit, that Ludlow prob- 
ably returned at the instance of the Lord Pro- 
tector, Oliver Cromwell. 

The early writers of colonial history, lacking 
the desire or opportunity for research, had this 
only to say of Ludlow after his departure from 
Connecticut, — that he went to either Virginia 
or England, and that his later fate was un- 
known. For more than two centuries the 
shadows hid him and his after-life from all 
men save the historical student and antiquary 
in search of truths of more interest to them, 
until within a few years other investigators — 
notably, Waters, in his Gefiealogical Gleanings 
in England ; Stiles, in his History of Ancient 
Windsor ; Miss Schenck, in her History 
of Fairfield, with its genealogy of Ludlow's 
family by the late Joseph Lemuel Chester, 
D.C.L., LL.D. ; and Beers, in his "Roger 
Ludlow," Magazine of American History, vol. 
viii. — have winnowed the truth from rumors 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 145 

and traditions and brought to light additional 
information of value. 

Something of Ludlow's lineage, of his do- 
mestic relationships, of his education, his early 
interest in colonial enterprises, his coming 
hither, his services in New England, his de- 
parture and its causes, and his return to Old 
England, were made known ; but many of the 
statements as to his later career in his native 
land are based on inference and conjecture, 
and the actual record of his service was not 
discovered or set forth in these investiga- 
tions. 

Ludlow left Fairfield in April or May, 1654, 
and after confiscation and sale of the vessel he 
first chartered (for previous illicit trading by 
its captain, at Virginia and with the Dutch) 
by the New Haven authorities, he sailed in 
another vessel, with his family, to Virginia to 
visit his brother, a man of position and large 
estate in that colony, as has been noted. 
From Virginia he sailed for Ireland, and cross- 
ing over to England he returned to Ireland in 
September, 1654, as certified in the memoirs 
of his kinsman, Sir Edmund Ludlow, — then 
Lieutenant-General of the forces in Ireland 
under Cromwell — who says: "Arrived at 



i 4 6 ROGER LUDLOW 

Holyhead. Here we met my cousin Roger 
Ludlow, who was then newly landed from 
Ireland, but finding us ready to set sail he re- 
turned thither with us." 

It is now possible, from authoritative sources, 
— the printed and manuscript records and re- 
ports at London, Dublin, and elsewhere, — to 
set forth with certainty and for the first time 
the facts in Ludlow's life after his departure 
from the colonies. They add new honor to 
his name, and justify all that has been written 
of his ability and fitness, not only for his ser- 
vice in New England, but among his peers in 
the complex problems that taxed the learned 
jurists of Old England. 

One of the most delicate and perplexing of 
governmental questions that arose in the reign 
of the Lord Protector was the determination of 
both law and fact in the valuation, allotment, 
and settlement of the forfeited estates in Ire- 
land, after its conquest and depopulation by 
transportation to other countries. Only men 
of recognized ability and honor could serve in 
such a relation. Who could be trusted, in 
those perilous times, to do exact justice, to 
act wisely and honestly, when so many mo- 
mentous issues, legal and equitable, called for 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 147 

adjudication ? Cromwell nominated these dis- 
tinguished men for that high service, and they 
were commissioned by the Lord Deputy and 
Council at Dublin, November 3, 1654: Rich- 
ard Pepys, Esq., Chief Justice of the Upper 
Bench in Ireland, and one of the Council ; 
Miles Corbett, Esq., one of the Council ; 
John Cooke, Esq. ; John Reading, Esq. ; Wil- 
liam Allen, Esq. ; Roger Ludlow, Esq. ; and 
Philip Carterett, Esq. The commission was a 
broad one, and clothed with ample powers to 
receive, hear, and determine all claims in and 
to forfeited lands in Ireland, whether of the 
Irish rebels ; under the Acts of Parliament 
in the seventeenth year of King Charles's 
reign; or belonging to the Crown in 1630; 
or " out of any of the lands, tenements or 
hereditaments lately belonging to any arch- 
bishop, bishop, dean, dean and chapter or 
other officers belonging to that Hierarchy 
in Ireland." 

There is a significant entry in the records of 
"Commissions and Instructions by the Lord 
Deputy and Council," in Dublin, which defines 
Ludlow's appointment to this commission, and 
marks the special honor conferred upon him 
within three months after his return from 



148 ROGER LUDLOW 

America, and after an absence of twenty-four 
years. 

By the Lord Deputy and Council, 

" It is ordered that Roger Ludlowe, Esq., be ap- 
pointed Commf for the administration of justice at Dub- 
lin, and likewise for the adjudication of claymes, and to 
that end it is ordered that he be inserted in the Respec- 
tive Commission for that Purpose ; and it is further or- 
dered that he be added to the Commission for the 
administration of justice in the County of Corke, and 
inserted in the Commission for the Peace of the said 
County, to the end he may act in the administration of 
justice there until he shall be otherwise disposed of as 
there may be occasion for the most advantage of the 
Commonwealth . 

"Dublin, the 18th of December, 1654. 

" T. H. CI. Council." 

Ludlow was chosen by Cromwell himself to 
serve on this important commission, his Amer- 
ican reputation being ample justification for 
the appointment ; and it is the judgment of 
students and critics of the written and unwrit- 
ten history of that time, that he was invited 
over for that very purpose. 

And this judgment rests upon substantial 
evidence. Cromwell knew well and held in 
honor the Ludlow family ; they were men of his 
stamp, of whom in all his life he had greatest 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 149 

need, whether at Worcester or Westminster. 
Its sons had laid down their lives in the 
Puritan cause. Henry Ludlow had rendered 
brilliant service in the Long Parliament, 
"made up of the very flower of the English 
gentry and the educated laity " (Morley). Sir 
Edmund Ludlow, Member of Parliament, one 
of the King's judges, stood so fast in Crom- 
well's esteem that he made him Lieutenant- 
General of Horse, civil commissioner, and 
Deputy in Ireland, and trusted him in the most 
important relations, public and private. No 
man in England knew better the merits of the 
Puritan leaders in New England — among 
whom he counted many acquaintances and 
friends — than Cromwell, and when need came 
for the Irish commission he made choice of 
another member of the Ludlow family, one of 
the founders of the Puritan state abroad, and 
made him a member by a special order. 

This preferment and appointment were also 
but incidents of a favorite scheme of the Lord 
Protector's, the repopulation of Ireland, after 
the conquest, and confiscation of estates, by 
men of the Puritan order ; and to accomplish 
this result he made the most strenuous efforts. 
The conditions in New England favored the 



ISO ROGER LUDLOW 

plan. Barren soil, cold climate, small capital, 
few products for exportation, and the lessened 
immigration after 1640 made life hard and la- 
bor unprofitable, and the unrest and discontent 
ripened into removals and attempts to remove 
to other lands. 

Take, for illustration, the energetic effort of 
Lord Say and Sele to get settlers to Old Prov- 
idence Island, which brought forth Winthrop's 
protest ; the schemes of Humphrey and Vines 
to withdraw people to the West Indies; the 
inquiries as to Virginia and the Caribbees ; the 
return of many to the mother country, some 
men of chief rank, as Winthrop says in his 
journal, and the remonstrances of the colonial 
authorities against removals from their juris- 
dictions. 

Cromwell undertook the task of bringing 
over the New England people to settle in Ire- 
land in a systematic way. He wrote letters 
to prominent men and sent over emissaries — 
emigration agents — with their pleas and pro- 
spectuses. He negotiated with John Cotton 
of Boston, William Cobbet of Lynn, William 
Hooke of New Haven, and Samuel Desbor- 
ough and William Leeteof Guilford, while Scot- 
tish captives and Irish children were being sent 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 151 

to New England and Virginia to be sold as 
slaves, under his orders. 

Ample proof that Cromwell had a general 
emigration movement in view, and that he 
held out inducements to prominent men in 
New England who were to lead it, is shown in 
an answer to one of his letters, December 31, 
1650. Evidence enough is this also of Crom- 
well's influence, and that his propositions had 
gone far toward consideration. But the Puri- 
tan in Massachusetts and elsewhere in New 
England in 1650 had had his lesson ; he was an 
apt scholar in Cromwellian history. 

These are the conditions of their emigration 
to Ireland for " enjoying the Lord in his ordi- 
nances," which Peter Bulkley of Concord, 
Thomas Cobbet and Samuel Whiting of 
Lynn, John Knowles of Watertown, Daniel 
Dennison of Boston, and John Tuttle of 
Ipswich set down in their answer to Crom- 
well's urgent invitation : (1) The same liberty 
of worship that they had in New England to 
be established by the State of England ; (2) 
proper outward encouragements in houses and 
lands by Parliament or the Council of State ; 
(3) land for free schools and colleges ; (4) free 
choice of a military governor from themselves 



152 ROGER LUDLOW 

or of nomination by them of some other per- 
son ; (5) land in a healthful part of Ireland ; 
(6) assistance " in regard of the meanness and 
inability of those godly persons who had or 
might join them to transport themselves " ; (7) 
freedom for some years from public charges ; 
(8) to have no Irish " but such as we shall like 
of " inhabit among them ; (9) convenient time 
to transport themselves. The conditions were 
not accepted, for the reason that Cromwell 
had no authority to do it, and what Parliament 
might do was problematical. The General 
Court ended the machinations in Massachu- 
setts, in a letter, October 21, 1651, to the Lord 
General, " to the end that no private informa- 
tion might occasion him to prejudice the col- 
ony by inviting over many of the inhabitants 
to be transplanted to Ireland." 

After the failure to colonize from Massachu- 
setts, special efforts were made in New Haven 
through Hooke, Desborough, and Leete, which 
did not cease until October, 1654 (six months 
after Roger Ludlow left Fairfield), but with- 
out notable results in migration to the " conve- 
nient lands fit for tillage, and secure and 
healthful location near the coast towns " 
[Irish.] 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 153 

And even then the project of colonization 
elsewhere was renewed, urgent appeals were 
made for colonists for Jamaica, by special 
messengers of Cromwell, notably by Daniel 
Gookin, once a member of the Massachusetts 
General Court ; and the agitation went on 
after the New Haven General Court, at the 
close of a stormy session so late as May, 1656, 
voted that " though they cannot but acknowl- 
edge the great loue, care and tender respect of 
his highnes the Lord Protector to New Eng- 
land in generall, and to this colonie in pticuler, 
yet for divers reasons they cannot conclude 
that God calls them to a present remove 
theither" [Jamaica.] 

There is therefore strong evidence that, with 
Cromwell's knowledge of New England men, 
his letters to them, his urgency to win them 
to his court, Roger Ludlow, at a critical point 
in his fortunes, was called to an office at Crom- 
well's behest, in which he found profit and 
honor and congenial service. 

Ludlow sat as a member during the whole 
course of the first Irish commission, from 1654 
to 1658, as shown in the Receiver General's 
accounts, with a payment entry " in full for his 
good services, Sept. 22, 1658.!' When the 



i 5 4 ROGER LUDLOW 

commission ceased, the record of Ludlow had 
been of such high degree that on the creation 
of a new commission, issued directly by order 
of the Lord Protector, he was again appointed, 
with Miles Corbett only from the old commis- 
sion ; and his other associates were Sir Gerrard 
Lowther, Sir John Temple, Sir Robert Mere- 
dith, James Donellan, John Santry, and 
Thomas Fowles. In addition to these respon- 
sible offices, Ludlow was also made a Master 
in Chancery in Ireland, a very honorable and 
lucrative post, and charged with the perform- 
ance of both judicial and ministerial duties of 
importance. 

The last reference to any public service of 
this strong man, in any presently known and 
accessible source, appears December 16, 1659; 
and it is very significant when it is recalled that 
he was then sixty-nine years old, that the first 
Protector was dead, that the second Protector 
had resigned, and that within five months 
Charles II. was on the throne. 

Receiver- General's accounts, 1659- 1660, 
page 1 20 : 

" Dec. 16, 1659. To M' Jonathan Ludlow by warr? 
dated ye 12* of Dec-, 1659, the sum of twenty pounds 
for ye use of Roger Ludlow for his care and pains 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 155 

taken in several publique services in this nacon, and 
is in ful satisfa u con of all past services done by him 
for ye Commonwealth." 

With these new facts in the closing years of 
Ludlow's life, after his departure from Connec- 
ticut, which patient and exhaustive investiga- 
tion has disclosed, a complete demonstration is 
made of his remarkable ability and readiness 
to deal with the vital questions of government, 
the great problems of law and equity, of civil and 
judicial administration, not alone in the storm 
of debate and decision in the colonial courts 
and meetings, but in the quiet and grave delib- 
erations and judgments of the tribunals of Old 
England, with men learned in the law and 
chosen for their special qualifications for his 
associates. 

All that can now be made known, all that 
may ever be known of Ludlow, other than 
what has been herein written from the earlier 
and newly discovered sources of information, 
is set forth in the entries and records of Saint 
Michan's Parish in Dublin. That he and his 
family became residents there on their arrival 
from America in 1654, there is no doubt : he is 
named in the will of his brother George, made 
in Virginia in 1655, and in which some of 



156 ROGER LUDLOW 

Roger's children were made legatees, as "at 
present living in Dublin " ; and that he was 
still living there at the age of seventy and 
four years is clearly proved by an entry 
in the list of baptisms, marriages, and burials 
of Saint Michan's Parish church, August 18, 
1663- September 13, 1664. It is this : " 1664, 
June 3. Burial, Mary Ludlow, wife to Roger 
Ludlow, Esq." Two things are evident from 
this entry : that Ludlow was then alive, as it 
was the invariable practice to state that the de- 
ceased was either a widow or a widower if such 
were the case ; and that he was then a resident 
in the parish, with his wife, or it would have 
been noted that the deceased's husband was not 
resident there. No further trace of Ludlow 
can now be found ; and while it is believed that 
he died in Dublin between 1664 and 1668, 
Saint Michan's records of those years are miss- 
ing, as are those at Holyhead, where mere tra- 
dition holds that he may have at last removed, 
so the evidence of the date of his death and 
burial place seems surely lost, and in these 
matters the present record of him must end 
with Brinley's words, written a generation ago : 
"No authority yet seen records his death or 
points to his grave." 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. . 157 

Any study or analysis of a human character 
which sees only its sunshine, not its shadows, 
its virtues, not its vices, its excellences, not 
its errors, must stand charged with a partiality, 
a prepossession which impairs its interest and 
value. Facts tell us who Ludlow was, and 
what he did ; and they need no embellish- 
ment ; but to complete the story of his career, 
it seems fitting to ask what was said of him in 
the camp of his critics, as well as in the home 
of his friends. 

What of him thought Winthrop and Dud- 
ley, Haynes and Hopkins, Eaton and Good- 
year, the men who saw most of him in his 
career in the two colonies ? Winthrop simply 
wrote in his journal that Ludlow on one occa- 
sion "grew into a passion"; Dudley stood 
with him in the early magisterial regime in 
Massachusetts ; Haynes, his successful rival 
in politics, gave him precedence in the courts ; 
Hopkins censured him for taking up Un- 
quowa, chiefly because he did not ask per- 
mission of the Court in advance ; Eaton and 
Goodyear called him a fomenter of insurrec- 
tion in his vigorous preparations for the de- 
fence of Fairfield ; possibly some of his 
associates in the General Court at Hartford 



158 ROGER LUDLOW 

halted at his impulsive action ; and Thomas 
Staples sued him for slander, for a bit of gos- 
sip repeated in confidence to some friends 
(Davenports) in New Haven. This is what 
the records disclose of weakness or of error in 
a public life of twenty-five years. With the cir- 
cumstances in each instance which have been 
told from the records, what is the utmost that 
may be said derogatory to the name and service 
of Ludlow ? 

That he was zealous for his rights, and jeal- 
ous of his honors ; that he was of imperious 
temper, and impatient of criticism ; that he 
was ready — too ready — to assume responsibil- 
ity ; that he misinterpreted public sentiment 
through impetuosity ; that he was over-con- 
fident, and did not bridle his tongue with 
discretion. 

Grant all these things, and they were merely 
faults of temperament. What are they worth 
in the presence of all he actually accomplished 
for the Commonwealth of Connecticut? In 
summing up his qualities, one recalls a strong 
man in our time much misunderstood, of whose 
character this analysis is given : 

" There was intellectual power, self-reliance, 
an iron will, unbending integrity, devoted 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 159 

patriotism, unusual capacity for work, adaptabil- 
ity to new duties, and an intense enthusiasm 
for whatever cause he espoused." 

Add to these supreme qualities of leadership, 
the cardinal virtues of honesty and honor in 
every public or private transaction, charity and 
good-will toward his friends and neighbors, 
and the love and affection which crowned his 
home-life with devotion to his wife and chil- 
dren, and the story of Roger Ludlow, so far as 
now known to history, is written. 

Connecticut builds its home of state, its 
capitol of massive strength and symmetry, 
dedicated to law and equity and justice, on the 
very homesteads of its first settlers. It looks 
on the very places where great deeds were 
done and the first history was written : north- 
ward, where the pioneers from Dorchester held 
the open lands in the Windsor palisado ; west- 
ward, to " Pequannocke and beyond," where 
the villages in the wilderness through fear and 
trembling grew to vigorous life ; southward, 
toward the broad haven and the meadows of 
the Quinnipiac, where Davenport and his 
goodly company sat down, and on the " long 
river " of both tragic and blessed memories ; 



160 ROGER LUDLOW 

and eastward, on the ancient hills which saw 
Ludlow, Hooker, Stone, and Rossiter, and all 
the pioneers, with their wives and children, on 
their perilous pilgrimage hither. 

And near at hand run the broad ways where 
the settlers made their homes in the three ori- 
ginal towns ; and there are the historic places 
where the forefathers went forth to war, where 
they listened to the preached word, where 
they held their solemn councils, and where the 
constitution was adopted ; and there, too, is 
the God's Acre, restored and beautified of late 
by their children's love, where many of them 
sleep. 

Connecticut in its capitol honors some of 
these men in spirited likenesses from the sculp- 
tor's hand ; tells its cherished traditions in tra- 
ceries and reliefs and symbolisms of vine and 
oak and classic legend ; hangs the portraits of 
its governors along its walls ; embodies its 
story of 1776 in statues of Hale, Putnam, and 
Knowlton ; folds with reverent hands the tat- 
tered battle flags of the Civil War that move 
all hearts to tears ; touches tenderly the guns 
that echo the victories on land and sea ; and 
invokes through its Commission of Sculpture 
the aid of highest art further to commemorate 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 161 

historic deeds. All this has the State done to 
preserve and perpetuate in part the memories 
of men who made her foremost in the history 
of the Republic ; and still it waits duly to honor 
him who, among the greatest, helped to lay 
the foundations of the State itself, as told in 
the records of his time. 

Empty niches, with canopies and pedestals 
complete, there are along the capitol facades, 
awaiting new forms in real or fancied sem- 
blance, and in the portal arches are the shields 
for inscription to tell the deeds now seemingly 
forgotten. 

What act more befitting, what privilege or 
duty more instant in its merits, than that the 
Commonwealth shall set in one of those places 
of honor a statue, in granite or in marble, of 
traditional or actual resemblance ; as others 
are, or of the ideal lawyer of his age, and 
name it Roger Ludlow ? 

Could the chiselled lips of Hooker and 
Davenport, Trumbull and Sherman, already 
standing there, be touched with life, they 
would bid him welcome as peer, companion, 
friend, " To the state a Counsellor full Deare," 
and ask that there be written, on the vacant 
portal shield, these words : 



162 ROGER LUDLOW 



To the 

MEMORY 

of 

ROGER LU DLO W 

Who 

Gave to Connecticut 

a Body of Laws 

and the 

First Written Constitution 

Which under God 

Acknowledged no Power 

Superior to 

the Supreme Power 

of the 

Commonwealth 



(From Brinleys "Reprint Laws ofConnectmit, 16/j "J 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES. 

Acknowledgment is here made to Benjamin 
Franklin Stevens, Esquire, of London, England, 
an American of Puritan lineage, son of the founder 
of the Vermont Historical Society, author of Fac- 
similes of Manuscripts in European Archives Relating 
to America, so invaluable to all students, readers, 
and writers of history ; whose services always have 
been generously accorded to American investigators, 
and through whose good offices the important facts 
in Ludlow's life after his departure from Connecticut 
have been made available. 

Prerogative Grant Index — Prerogative Will Book — 
Diocese of Cork Wills— Cork Marriage License Bonds — 
Bill Book Commonwealth Period — Commissions and In- 
structions by the Lord Deputy and Council— Receiver- 
General's Accounts — Exchequer and Patent Rolls — 
Chancery Bills and Decrees — Saint Michan's Parish 
Church Records. (All at Dublin, Ireland.) 

Hanaper Papers — Calendar Inner Temple Records — 
Historical Manuscripts Commission Report, vol. 2 (Or- 
monde Manuscripts)— Diet, of Nat. Biog.— Calendar of 
Colonial Papers, America and West Indies — Gentry of 
Anglesea — Foster's Alumni Oxonienses — Nelson's Sir 

163 



164 ROGER LUDLOW 

George Carteret — Connecticut Colonial Records, vol. i 
— New Haven Colonial Records, 1638-53-69 — Whit- 
more's Colonial Laws of Massachusetts — New England's 
Memorial — Mourt's Relation — Clap's Memoir — Blake's 
Annals — Winthrop's Journal — Memo. History of Bos- 
ton — Stiles's History of Ancient Windsor — Mason's 
Brief History of Pequot War — Records of the Governor 
and Company of Massachusetts Bay — Massachusetts 
Colonial Records, vol. 1 — Massachusetts Hist. Coll. — 
Schenck's History of Fairfield — Waters's Genealogical 
Gleanings in England (Reg. 41 : 42 : 43) — Sir Edmund 
Ludlow's Memoirs (1699) — Memo. History Hartford 
County — Trumbull's Blue Laws, False and True — Trum- 
bull's Constitutions of Connecticut — Trumbull's Life of 
Lechford — Commissioners' Notes on Revisions of Laws 
of Connecticut — Palfrey's History of New England — 
Elliott's History of New England — Neal's History 
of the Puritans — Hawes's Centennial Address — Bush- 
nell's Historical Estimate — Bradford's History of 
Plymouth Plantation — Sparks's American Biography 
(Mason, Hutchinson, Stiles) — Fiske's Beginnings of 
New England — Fiske's Dutch and Quaker Colonies — 
Histories of Connecticut (Trumbull, Hollister, De For- 
est, Sanford, Johnson) — O'Callaghan's New Netherlands 
— Larned's History of Ready Reference (Topics : Con- 
necticut, Massachusetts, New England, Puritan, Nether- 
lands) — Records of the United Colonies — History of 
Dorchester — Walker's Thomas Hooker, and First Church 
in Hartford — Twichell's John Winthrop — Wolcott's 
Memoir Relating to Connecticut — Hazard's State Papers 
— Campbell's Puritan in England, Holland, and Amer- 
ica — Historic Towns of New England (Talcott's 



THE COLONIAL LAWMAKER. 165 

Hartford) — A Walk about Hartford in 1640 (Talcott)— 
Bliss's Side Glimpse's from Colonial Meeting House 
— Parkman's Jesuits in North America, and French 
Regime in Canada — Jones's Life and Work of Thomas 
Dudley — Robinson's (H. C.) Constitutional History of 
Connecticut, and Reunion Address in 1889 — Byington's 
Puritan in England and New England, and The Puritan 
as Colonist and Reformer — Prince's New England 
Chronology (Annals) — Lodge's Colonial Period — Beers's 
Roger Ludlowe, Mag. of American History — Adams's 
Emancipation of Massachusetts — De Tocqueville's De- 
mocracy in America — Bancroft's History of the United 
States — Green's Short History of English People — Har- 
per's Marches of Wales — Scull, and Ludlow — Bruges's 
Pedigree of the Ludlows of Hill Deverill — Baker's Lud- 
low (Town and Neighborhood) — Wright's Antiquities 
of Ludlow — Brown's Pilgrim Fathers and their Puritan 
Successors — Bacon's Constitutional History of Connecti- 
cut — Young's Chronicles of the First Planters — Hutchin- 
son's History of Massachusetts — Hamersley's Connecti- 
cut : Origin of Courts and Laws — Drake's History and 
Antiquities of Boston — Massachusetts Body of Liberties 
— Emerson's Education in Massachusetts : its Early Legis- 
lation and History — Lechford's Plaine Dealing; or Newes 
from New England — Ellis's Puritan Age in Massachusetts 
— Goodwin's Pilgrim Republic — Hoar's The Lawyer and 
the State — Day's Note on Ludlow — Town Records, 
Hartford, Windsor, and Fairfield — Memorial Addresses, 
J. H. Hayden — Commonwealth v. Roxbury (9 Gray, 
480) — Howe's Puritan Republic — Webster v. Harwinton 
(36 Conn., 131) — Records Massachusetts Court of 
Assistants — Gorham's Life of Stanton — Lowell's Witch- 



1 66 ROGER LUDLOW 

craft, and New England Two Centuries Ago — Haw- 
thorne's Scarlet Letter — Baldwin's Three Constitutions 
of Connecticut — Cooley's Constitutional Limitations — 
Roger Williams (Sparks's American Biography) — Burt's 
First Century History of Springfield — Latimer's Salem — 
State v. Williams, Treasurer (68 Conn., 131). 



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